Question

I have a 1 time transformation to do to a large XML file.

I have :

[stuff]
<items>string1,string2,string3,string4</items>
[other stuff]

I want to replace it with :

<itemList>
    <item>string1</item>
    <item>string2</item>
    <item>string3</item>
    <item>string4</item>
</itemList>

I’m hesitating between using a RegEx or XSL. I’ve been trying to go the regex way :

Search

^.*<items>(.*)</items>

Replace with

<itemList>\1</itemList>

I’m stuck at the “find comma and replace them by something”. I’m not even sure it’s doable…

How could I finish this RegEx? Should I go XSL instead?

Answer 1

I would use XSLT 2.0.

XML Input:

<doc>
  <stuff>sdfsadfsa</stuff>
  <items>string,string,string,string</items>
  <otherstuff>sdfasdfsaf</otherstuff>
</doc>

XSLT 2.0:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="items">
    <itemList>
      <xsl:for-each select="tokenize(.,',')">
        <item><xsl:value-of select="."/></item>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </itemList>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

XML Output:

<doc>
   <stuff>sdfsadfsa</stuff>
   <itemList>
      <item>string</item>
      <item>string</item>
      <item>string</item>
      <item>string</item>
   </itemList>
   <otherstuff>sdfasdfsaf</otherstuff>
</doc>

If you don’t have an XSLT 2.0 processor, I would suggest Saxon.