Question

is it possible to do the following in xsl. I’m tring to split the contents of an element and create sub-elements based on the split. To make things trickier there are the occasional exception (ie node-4 doesn’t get split). I’m wondering if there is a way i can do this without explicit splits hardcoded for each element. Again, not sure if this is possible. thanks for the help!

original XML:

<document>
  <node>
    <node-1>hello world1</node-1>
    <node-2>hello^world2</node-2>
    <node-3>hello^world3</node-3>
    <node-4>hello^world4</node-4>
  </node>
</document>

transformed XML

<document>
  <node>
    <node-1>hello world1</node-1>
    <node-2>
      <node2-1>hello</node2-1>
      <node2-2>world2</node2-2>
    </node-2>
    <node-3>
      <node3-1>hello</node3-1>
      <node3-2>world3</node3-2>
    </node-3>
    <node-4>hello^world4</node-4>
  </node>
</document>

Answer 1

Here’s an XSL 1.0 solution. I presume that the inconsistency in node-4 in your sample output was just a typo. Otherwise you’ll have to define why node3 was split and node4 wasn’t.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" version="1.0">

  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <document>
      <node>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="document/node/*"/>
      </node>
    </document>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:variable name="tag" select="name()"/>

    <xsl:choose>

      <xsl:when test="contains(text(),'^')">
        <xsl:element name="{$tag}">
          <xsl:element name="{concat($tag,'-1')}">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-before(text(),'^')"/>
          </xsl:element>
          <xsl:element name="{concat($tag,'-2')}">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(text(),'^')"/>
          </xsl:element>
        </xsl:element>
      </xsl:when>

      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
      </xsl:otherwise>

    </xsl:choose>

  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This works as long as all the nodes you want split are at the same level, under /document/node. If the real document structure is different you will have to tweak the solution to match.