Question

How do I apply a change to text in an element without losing its child elements.

For example:

I have this xml that I would like to apply a change to the text inside the ‘p’ element….

<section>     <p >Awesome LO</p>     <p >         Begin with an interesting fact, thought-provoking         <keyword>question</keyword>         <context>             <p type='Key Words Head'>Banana</p>             <p type='Key Words'>A tasty treat to eat any time, and good with ice cream – a banana split.</p>         </context>, or a one sentence scenario to illustrate why the learning object (content) is important.     </p>     <p >         Begin with a definition, if required. Then, provide an example by example view.     </p> </section> 

So my xsl looks like this….

<xsl:template match='p'>     <xsl:copy>         <xsl:call-template name='widont-title'>             <xsl:with-param name='text' select='text()' />         </xsl:call-template>     </xsl:copy> </xsl:template> 

The problem is that I lose the ‘keyword’, ‘context’, and other elements inside of the ‘p’ when I do this. Can anyone point me to any clues? Thanks!

<!-- this method puts a non breaking space in the last word of a 'p' if its less than 5 characters--> <xsl:template name='widont-title'>     <xsl:param name='temp'/>     <xsl:param name='text'/>     <xsl:param name='minWidowLength' select='5'/>      <xsl:choose>         <xsl:when test='contains($text, ' ')'>             <xsl:variable name='prev' select='substring-before($text,' ')'/>             <xsl:variable name='before' select='concat($temp,' ',$prev)'/>             <xsl:variable name='after' select='substring-after($text, ' ')'/>              <xsl:choose>                 <xsl:when test='contains($after, ' ')'>                     <xsl:call-template name='widont-title'>                         <xsl:with-param name='temp' select='$before'/>                         <xsl:with-param name='text' select='$after'/>                     </xsl:call-template>                 </xsl:when>                 <xsl:when test='not(contains($after, ' ')) and string-length(translate($after,'`~!@#$%^\*()-_=+\\|]}[{;:,./?&lt;&gt;','')) &lt; $minWidowLength'>                      <xsl:value-of select='concat($before, '&#160;', $after)' />                 </xsl:when>                 <xsl:otherwise>                     <xsl:value-of select='concat($before, ' ', $after)' />                 </xsl:otherwise>             </xsl:choose>         </xsl:when>         <xsl:otherwise>             <xsl:value-of select='$text'/>         </xsl:otherwise>     </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> 

Answer 1

It is not clear what the widont-title template does and whether this is correctly implemented (looks a little-bit too-complicated), but the problem is that this template is applied too-soon, not leaving any possibilities for children elements of p to be processed.

The solution (using the identity template and overriding it for p/text() nodes) is very simple:

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'  xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>     <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration='yes'/>     <xsl:template match='node()|@*'>         <xsl:copy>             <xsl:apply-templates select='node()|@*'/>         </xsl:copy>     </xsl:template>     <xsl:template match='p/text()'>         <xsl:call-template name='widont-title'>             <xsl:with-param name='text' select='.' />         </xsl:call-template>     </xsl:template>           <!-- 'widont-title' template omitted for brevity -->  </xsl:stylesheet> 

when the above transformation is applied on the provided XML document, the children of any p element are correctly present in the output.