Question

I am trying to traverse Docbook section nodes. Their structure are as follows:

<sect1>    <sect2>       <sect3>          <sect4>             <sect5>             </sect5>          </sect4>       </sect3>    </sect2> </sect1> 

So sect1 only have sect2 inside, sect2 will only have sect3 inside, and so on. We can also have multiple sub nodes within a node; for instance multiple sect2 within a sect1.

Programatically I would iterate through them recursively using a counter for keeping track of which section the loop is at.

This time I have to use XSLT and to loop through it. Thus is there an equivalent way, or better way of doing this in XSLT?

Edit: I already have similar code as suggested by Willie, where I specify every sect node (sect1 to sect5). I am looking for solution where it loops determining the sect node by itself, and I won’t have to repeat code. I am aware that Docbook specs only allows up to 5 nested nodes.

Answer 1

If you are doing the same processing to all sect{x} nodes, regardles of {x}, as you say in one of the comments, then the following is sufficient:

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'  xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>     <xsl:template match=      'sect1|sect2|sect3|sect4|sect5'>       <!-- Some processing here -->       <xsl:apply-templates/>     </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> 

If you really need to process in the same way many more elements having different names of the form ‘sect'{x} (let’s say x is in the range [1, 100]), then the following can be used:

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'  xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>     <xsl:template match=      '*[starts-with(name(), 'sect')       and         substring-after(name(), 'sect') >= 1       and         not(substring-after(name(), 'sect') > 101)        ]'>       <!-- Some processing here -->       <xsl:apply-templates/>     </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>