Question

I’m trying to group elements using xsl:for-each in XSLT 2.0.

Here is an illustration of my input:

<root>
     <chapter>
           <heading> heading text </heading>
           <title> title </title>
           <p> 1111 </p>
           <p> 2222 </p>
           <center> text </center>
           <p> 3333 </p>
           <title>  another title </title>
           <p> 4444 </p>
           <center> text </center>
           <p> 5555 </p>
     </chapter>
     <chapter>
          <heading> heading text </heading>
          <title>  another title </title>
          <p> 6666 </p>
          <p> 7777 </p>
          <title>  another title </title>
          <p> 8888 </p>
          <p> 9999 </p>
     </chapter>
<root>

I am trying to group this document by matching on each <title> element and grouping every following element until the next <title> into an element <section>. Here is what I want my output to look like:

<root>
     <chapter>
          <heading> Heading text </heading>
          <section>
               <title>  title </title>
               <p> 1111 </p>
               <p> 2222 </p>
               <center> text </center>
               <p> 3333 </p>
          </section>
          <section>
               <title>  title </title>
               <p> 4444 </p>
               <center> text </center>
               <p> 5555 </p>
          </section>
          <section>
               <title>  title </title>
               <p> 6666 </p>
               <p> 7777 </p>
               <center> text </center>
               <p> 8888 </p>
               <p> 9999 </p>
          </section>
     <chapter>
<root>

My current template that is not working:

<xsl:template match="chapter">
    <chapter>
      <xsl:for-each-group select="*" group-starting-with="title">
             <section>
                <xsl:copy-of select="current-group()" />
             </section>
      </xsl:for-each-group>
    </chapter>             
</xsl:template>

The stylesheet above does group the sections that I want however however it also groups each <heading> element into it’s own <section> for some reason. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You probably want

<xsl:copy-of select="current-group()" />

rather than value-of. For the headings, if you know that each chapter will only have one heading element then you could say

<xsl:template match="chapter">
      <xsl:copy-of select="heading" />
      <xsl:for-each-group select="*[not(self::heading)]" group-starting-with="title">
             <section>
                <xsl:copy-of select="current-group()" />
             </section>
      </xsl:for-each-group>             
</xsl:template>

i.e. pull out the heading separately and then exclude it from the set of elements to be grouped.