Extracting plaintext from XML with embedded links using XSLT

Question

I am trying to extract text from XML similar to the following:

<p>This is a paragraph <a href='http://link.com'>with an embedded link</a> with more text afterwards</p>

I would like the extracted text to maintain the URL within the the paragraph, like this:

This is a paragraph with an embedded link (http://link.com) with more text afterwards

It is fairly straight forward to extract the text:

<xsl:value-of select="p"/> and the URL: <xsl:value-of select="p/a/@href"/>, but I am struggling to think of a way to embed the URL within the extracted text using XSLT.

Any ideas on how this can be done?

If there is no easy way to do this I may end up either doing some pre-processing of the text to embed the URL and just use XSLT to extract all the text from there.

Kirill Polishchuk · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-03 09:12:20Z

4

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

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

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

  <xsl:template match="a">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>

    <xsl:value-of select="concat(' (', @href, ')')"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Template <xsl:template match="text()"> matches text nodes and simply outputs them.

Template <xsl:template match="a"> outputs content of a element and its (@href) value.

edited Nov 3, 2011 at 9:12

answered Nov 3, 2011 at 5:17

Kirill Polishchuk

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3 Comments

FailedDev Over a year ago

Some explanation of what you are doing would be helpful :D. Do that and you get +1.

Dimitre Novatchev Over a year ago

Good approach but rough on the edges: it relies on some whitespace being there in the surrounding text nodes -- generally, this maynot be the case.

johnhforrest Over a year ago

@DimitreNovatchev True, some of the links may be at the end of sentences or followed by text in a sentence. I'll see if I can get rid of that issue.

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