Question

I have a little problem.
A node in my XML may contains and integer, and i have to replace this integer by a string.
Each number match with a string.

For example i have:

---

Integer – String

1 – TODO

2 – IN PROGRESS

3 – DONE

4 – ERROR

5 – ABORTED

---

Original XML:

    <root>
       <status>1</status>
    </root>

---

Converted XML:

    <root>
       <status>TODO</status>
    </root>

So i want replace 1 by “TODO”, 2 by “IN PROGRESS” …

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
            <xsl:template match="/root/status">
    <root>
      <status>
                <xsl:variable name="text" select="." />

                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="contains($text, '1')">

                        <xsl:value-of select="'TODO'"/>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
    </status></root>
            </xsl:template>
    </xsl:stylesheet>

I’am asking if there is another way to do that.

Answer 1

There are a number of ways of doing this. Where the translation is from consecutive integers in the range 1 to N, I would use

<xsl:variable name="index" select="xs:integer(status)"/>
<xsl:value-of select="('TODO', 'IN PROGRESS', 'DONE', 'ERROR', 'ABORTED')[$index]"/>

In other cases where there’s a small number of values I might use template rules:

<xsl:template match="status[.='1']" mode="lookup">TODO</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="status[.='2']" mode="lookup">IN PROGRESS</xsl:template>

etc.

In other cases a lookup table makes sense (note that Dimitre’s version with its cumbersome document(”) call is designed for XSLT 1.0 – it’s considerably simpler if you’re using 2.0. When people don’t say what version they are using I generally assume 2.0 and Dimitre generally assumes 1.0.)

I’m increasingly seeing people make the mistake of using contains() when they mean “=”. If you want to test whether the content of a node is “X”, use $node = "X", not contains($node, "X").