Question

The problem is I want to distinguish same elements name with different situation. For example:

<element>Hello StackOverFlow</element>
<element>
  <group>
     <ge>hello g1</ge>
     <ge>hello g2</ge>
  </group>
  <group>
     <ge>hello g3</ge>
     <ge>hello g4</ge>
  </group>
</element>

I want to have elements with text convert into

<div class="text_element">Hello StackOverFlow</div>

and for those elements with child nodes:

<div class="element">
  <ul class="group">
     <li>hello g1</li>
     <li>hello g2</li>
  </ul>
  <ul class="group">
     <li>hello g3</li>
     <li>hello g4</li>
  </ul>
</div>

So, the problem is how can I distinguish these two kind of elements in writing the template?

Answer 1

You can use count the descendant elements to see whether or not it has children, e.g. count(descendant::group)=0

The XSLT (assuming a root node xml on your input):

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.1" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="/xml">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="element"/>
    </xsl:template>

    <!-- No children -->
    <xsl:template match="element[count(descendant::group)=0]">
        <div class="text_element">
            <xsl:value-of select="text()"/>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

    <!-- With children -->
    <xsl:template match="element[count(descendant::group)&gt;0]">
        <div class="element">
            <xsl:apply-templates select="group"/>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="group">
        <ul class="group">
            <xsl:apply-templates select="ge"/>
        </ul>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="ge">
        <li>
            <xsl:value-of select="text()"/>
        </li>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Gives the output

<div class="text_element">Hello StackOverFlow</div>
<div class="element">
  <ul class="group">
    <li>hello g1</li>
    <li>hello g2</li>
  </ul>
  <ul class="group">
    <li>hello g3</li>
    <li>hello g4</li>
  </ul>
</div>