Question

I have some data in an XML element that looks like this:

<item value='category1,category2'>Item Name</item> 

The bit I’m interested in is the value attribute. I’m able to get the data contained in this attribute into a template which looks like this:

<xsl:template name='RenderValues'>     <xsl:param name='ValueList' />     <xsl:value-of select='$ValueList' /> <!-- outputs category1,category2--> </xsl:template> 

What I want to do is to process the comma separated values in an efficient manner. What is the best way to render something like the following from inside the RenderValues template?

<a href='x.asp?item=category1'>category1</a> <a href='x.asp?item=category2'>category2</a> 

Answer 1

In XSLT 2.0/XPath 2.0 use the standard XPath 2.0 function tokenize().

In XSLT 1.0 one needs either to write a recursively called template or, more conveniently, use the str-split-to-words function/template of the FXSL library.

Here is an example of the latter:

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'  xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'  xmlns:ext='http://exslt.org/common'  > <!--                                                 -->    <xsl:import href='strSplit-to-Words.xsl'/> <!--                                                 -->    <xsl:output indent='yes' omit-xml-declaration='yes'/> <!--                                                 -->     <xsl:template match='/*'>       <xsl:variable name='vwordNodes'>         <xsl:call-template name='str-split-to-words'>           <xsl:with-param name='pStr' select='string(@value)'/>           <xsl:with-param name='pDelimiters'                            select='', &#10;''/>         </xsl:call-template>       </xsl:variable> <!--                                                 -->       <xsl:apply-templates select='ext:node-set($vwordNodes)/*'/>     </xsl:template> <!--                                                 -->     <xsl:template match='word' priority='10'>       <a href='x.asp?item={.}'><xsl:value-of select='.'/></a>     </xsl:template> <!--                                                 --> </xsl:stylesheet> 

When the above transformation is applied on the provided XML document:

<item value='category1,category2'>Item Name</item> 

the wanted result is produced:

<a href='x.asp?item=category1' xmlns:ext='http://exslt.org/common'>category1</a> <a href='x.asp?item=category2' xmlns:ext='http://exslt.org/common'>category2</a> 

The pDelimiters parameter of this template allow multiple delimiting characters to be specified. In the above example, any separating character can be either a comma, a space or a new line character.