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Re: Rephrasing the problem [was Re: Second try: Search and replace many strings that may not be present in target
At 03:19 PM 5/20/2002, Greg wrote:
> I figured it out just after sending... I was calling
> substring-before() and substring-after(), both of which convert a node to
> a string. An alternate (and more successful) way of doing what you want
> is to use d-o-e and CDATA sections, though it makes many XSLT'ers blood
> boil. Remember that d-o-e is not a mandatory option for an XSLT engine.
It's not that it makes our blood boil (why should you care about the state
of my cardiovascular system? :-) or even that it's not universally
supported ... it's that it locks the application into one processing model,
namely one in which the output is written to a file. If you ever use XSLT
another way -- maybe pipelining transforms or browsing client-side in
Mozilla -- it'll break.
Personally I find d-o-e far less troublesome when I can be assured that
writing to a file will Always Always happen. But that's a big thing to
assume, especially when helping a friendly stranger who may not yet have
become perfectly familiar with all the ins-and-outs of XSLT minutiae, and
why one needs to ask such obscure questions about the operational scenario.
I agree with Stuart that this is only an XSLTish problem at a stretch.
Partly because it's designed to be side-effect-free and not depend on a
particular processing order, XSLT has trouble with such notions as "the
first time a string occurs in the document, in any <p> element". It can be
done but it involves some pretty creative twisting-and-turning. As Greg is
kindly showing. :->
Regards,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com
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