Question

I have some XML like so:

    <subsection number="5">
       <p>
         (5) The <link path="123">Secretary of State</link> shall appoint such as....
      </p>
    </subsection>

I can’t change the XML and I need to strip out the (5) at the start of the paragraph and use the number attribute in the parent tag to create a new paragraph number with appropriate markup:

<xsl:template match="subsection/p">
        <xsl:variable name="number">
            <xsl:text>(</xsl:text>
            <xsl:value-of select="../@number"/>
            <xsl:text>)</xsl:text>
       </xsl:variable>
       <xsl:variable name="copy">
            <xsl:value-of select="."/>
       </xsl:variable>
       <p>
          <span class="indent">
            <xsl:value-of select="$number" />
          </span>
          <span class="copy">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($copy, $number)" />
          </span>
       </p>
</xsl:template>

The problem is the rest of the paragraph may contain more XML that needs to be transformed, such as the link tag in the example.

I don’t know how to apply templates to this once I’ve used the substring-after function.

Answer 1

An explicit approach is to handle the first text child of subsection/p elements separately from all other children. For demonstration purposes, I’ve also added a template for converting link elements into a elements.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
    <xsl:template match="subsection/p/text()[1]">
        <xsl:value-of select="concat('(', ../../@number, ')')"/>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="subsection/p">
        <p>
            <span class="indent">
                <xsl:apply-templates select="text()[1]"/>
            </span>
            <span class="copy">
                <xsl:apply-templates select="*|text()[not(position()=1)]"/>
            </span>
        </p>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="subsection/p/link">
        <a href="{@path}"><xsl:value-of select="."/></a>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This stylesheet produces the following output:

<p><span class="indent">(5)</span><span class="copy">
<a href="123">Secretary of State</a>shall appoint such as....</span></p>