I have a text file which looks like that:
XXX^YYYY^AAAAA^XXXXXX^AAAAAA....
Fields are separated using a caret(^), my presumptions are:
the first field = NAME
the second filed = Last name
third field = Address
etc..
I would like to turn it into a valid XML using xsl (XSLT). such as:
<name>XXX</name>
<l_name>YYYY</l_name>
I know It can be done easily with Perl, but I need to do it with XSLT, if possible.
Text (non-XML) files can be read with the standard XSLT 2.0 function unparsed-text().
Then one can use the standard XPath 2.0 function tokenize() and two other standard XPath 2.0 functions that accept regular a expression as one of their arguments -- matches() and replace().
XSLT 2.0 has its own powerful instructions to handle text processing using regular expressions:: the <xsl:analyze-string>, the <xsl:matching-substring> and the <xsl:non-matching-substring> instruction.
See some of the more powerful capabilities of XSLT text processing with these functions and instructions in this real-world example: an XSLT solution to the WideFinder problem.
Finally, here is an XSLT 1.0 solution:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:ext="http://exslt.org/common"
xmlns:my="my:my" exclude-result-prefixes="ext my">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<my:fieldNames>
<name>FirstName</name>
<name>LastName</name>
<name>City</name>
<name>State</name>
<name>Zip</name>
</my:fieldNames>
<xsl:variable name="vfieldNames" select=
"document('')/*/my:fieldNames"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:variable name="vrtfTokens">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="vTokens" select=
"ext:node-set($vrtfTokens)"/>
<results>
<xsl:apply-templates select="$vTokens/*"/>
</results>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()" name="tokenize">
<xsl:param name="pText" select="."/>
<xsl:if test="string-length($pText)">
<xsl:variable name="vWord" select=
"substring-before(concat($pText, '^'),'^')"/>
<word>
<xsl:value-of select="$vWord"/>
</word>
<xsl:call-template name="tokenize">
<xsl:with-param name="pText" select=
"substring-after($pText,'^')"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="word">
<xsl:variable name="vPos" select="position()"/>
<field>
<xsl:element name="{$vfieldNames/*[position()=$vPos]}">
</xsl:element>
<value><xsl:value-of select="."/></value>
</field>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
When this transformation is applied to the following XML document:
<t>John^Smith^Bellevue^WA^98004</t>
the wanted, correct result is produced:
<results>
<field>
<FirstName/>
<value>John</value>
</field>
<field>
<LastName/>
<value>Smith</value>
</field>
<field>
<City/>
<value>Bellevue</value>
</field>
<field>
<State/>
<value>WA</value>
</field>
<field>
<Zip/>
<value>98004</value>
</field>
</results>
Tokenizing and sorting with XSLT 1.0
If you use xslt 2.0 it's much simpler: fn:tokenize(string,pattern)
Example: tokenize("XPath is fun", "\s+")
Result: ("XPath", "is", "fun")
