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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T00:57:18+00:00

I’ve found a lot of examples that reference Java and C for this, but

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I’ve found a lot of examples that reference Java and C for this, but how do I, or can I, check for the existence of an external file with XSL.

First, I realize that this is only a snippet, but it’s part of a huge stylesheet, so I’m hoping it’s enough to show my issue.

    <!-- Use this template for Received SMSs -->
<xsl:template name="ReceivedSMS">
    <!-- Set/Declare "SMSname" variable (local, evaluates per instance) -->
    <xsl:variable name="SMSname">
        <xsl:value-of select=" following-sibling::Name"/>
    </xsl:variable>
    <fo:table font-family="Arial Unicode MS" font-size="8pt" text-align="start">
        <fo:table-column column-width=".75in"/>
        <fo:table-column column-width="6.75in"/>
        <fo:table-body>
            <fo:table-row>
                <!-- Cell contains "speakers" icon -->
                <fo:table-cell display-align="after">
                    <fo:block text-align="start">
                        <fo:external-graphic src="../images/{$SMSname}.jpg" content-height="0.6in"/>

What I’d like to do, is put in an “if” statement, surronding the {$SMSname}.jpg line. That is:

                     <fo:block text-align="start">
                        <xsl:if test="exists( the external file {$SMSname}.jpg)">
                            <fo:external-graphic src="../images/{$SMSname}.jpg" content-height="0.6in"/>                            
                        </xsl:if>
                        <xsl:if test="not(exists( the external file {$SMSname}.jpg))">
                            <fo:external-graphic src="../images/unknown.jpg" content-height="0.6in"/>                            
                        </xsl:if>
                    </fo:block>

Because of “grouping”, etc., I’m using XSLT 2.0. I hope that this is something that can be done. I hope even more that it’s something simple.

As always, thanks in advance for any help.
LO

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No, this cannot be done using XSLT 2.0/XPath 2.0.

    The XSLT 2.0 function unparsed-text-available() is only suitable for locating text files and even if a text file with the specifies URI exists this function may return false(), because it also must read the contents of the file and check that it only contains allowed characters.

    From the spec:

    “The unparsed-text-available function determines whether a call on the unparsed-text function with identical arguments would return a string.

    If the first argument is an empty sequence, the function returns false. If the second argument is an empty sequence, the function behaves as if the second argument were omitted.

    In other cases, the function returns true if a call on unparsed-text with the same arguments would succeed, and false if a call on unparsed-text with the same arguments would fail with a non-recoverable dynamic error.

    Note:

    This requires that the unparsed-text-available function should actually attempt to read the resource identified by the URI, and check that it is correctly encoded and contains no characters that are invalid in XML
    “

    End of quotation.

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