Re: [xsl] stylesheet vs egrep

[Trevor Nash <tcn at melvaig dot co dot uk>]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 11:35:49 +0000, Ahmad J Reeves wrote:

>Hi there,
>
>I have xml files that contain 4 types of tags,
>direct,local,global and admin in varying numbers

>I need to get a list of all the character_id's, and then
>remove the duplicates and count them. With the following
>stylesheet,
>[snip]
>Is it my stylesheet thats lying, or my egrep ?
>
The stylesheet, because you are forgetting the built-in templates.
This means two things:
1. the default is to copy text nodes to the output: some of these are
numbers, hence the strange results.
2. you are doing much more work than is necessary, since most of your
templates are just visiting children, which is what the default does
anyway.

Try this:
<xsl:stylesheet
        xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
        version="1.0">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>

<xsl:variable name="NL" select="'&#xA;'"/> 


 <xsl:template match="CHARACTER_ID">
  
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
        <xsl:value-of select="$NL"/>
      
 </xsl:template>

<!-- throw away all text nodes -->
<xsl:template match="text()" />

</xsl:stylesheet>

The only reason for putting other templates in would be to avoid
traversing bits of the document where you know there are no
CHARACTER_ID nodes, which might make the transform a bit faster.
Unless the input document is huge this isn't likely to make much
difference, and of course it makes it more prone to bugs.

Regards
Trevor Nash
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