Question

I have the following structure of xml data to transform:

     <chapter>
          <title>Text</title>
          <subtitle>Text</subtitle>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <subtitle>Text</subtitle>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <other>Text</other>
      </chapter>

      <chapter>
          <title>Text</title>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <other>Text</other>
      </chapter>

      <chapter>
          <title>Text</title>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <subtitle>Text</subtitle>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <paragraph>Text</paragraph>
          <other>Text</other>
      </chapter>

As you can see, the subtitles in the different chapters have no permanent pattern. In the output, I need to set the subtitles on the same place like the are in the xml. For the paragraph tags, I use a for-each loop. Like this:

<xsl:template match="chapter">
  <xsl:for-each select="paragraph">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

And now, I need to set the subtitles above, between or among the paragraphs in the order they are in the xml. How can I do this? Please help!

Answer 1

Would this do it?

<xsl:template match="chapter">
  <xsl:for-each select="paragraph | subtitle">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

But as David Carlisle points out, the typical XSLT approach is to split this out into templates, and this especially makes sense if you want special handling for certain ones:

<xsl:template match="chapter">
   <xsl:apply-templates select="paragraph | subtitle" />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="paragraph">
   <xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="subtitle">
   <!-- do stuff with subtitles -->
</xsl:template>