How to select sentences starts with a special character in XSL?-CodePudding

I have an XML file like the following.

<paper>
    <Question_01>
        <QNo>1a</QNo>
        <Question>What is Semantic Web? </Question>
    </Question_01>
    <Question_01>
        <QNo>1b</QNo>
        <Question>“Web 2.0 applications can be used to increase the profit of a business“ Discuss.</Question>
    </Question_01>
    <Question_01>
        <QNo>1c</QNo>
        <Question>Discuss the advantage of the Extensible Markup Language.</Question>
    </Question_01>
</paper>

I want to select questions that start from 'W', as the QNo - 1a and 1b should be the output XSLT. So that I wrote the following code in XSL.

<xsl:for-each select = "paper/Question_01">
    <xsl:if test = "starts-with(Question, 'W')">
        <li>
            <xsl:value-of select = "Question"/>
        </li>
    </xsl:if>                       
</xsl:for-each>

But it selects only the QNo - 1a. How can I write the XSL code as it selects both QNo - 1a and 1b and also as if the relevant sentence can start with several special characters and whitespace following 'W'? Thank you.

CodePudding user response：

You can use the translate function to get rid of unwanted characters. But you have to list them. Here is an example of the condition for the example given:

starts-with(normalize-space(translate(Question,'“','')), 'W')

So add all unwanted chars to the appropriate parameter of the translate function. This is probably the preferred approach for only a couple of characters. But for a lot of chars a different strategy may fit better (Not necessarily an XSLT-1.0 impl).

You could also simplify the whole code snippet to

<xsl:for-each select = "paper/Question_01[starts-with(normalize-space(translate(Question,'“','')), 'W')]">
    <li>
        <xsl:value-of select = "Question"/>
    </li>
</xsl:for-each>

The output should be the same in both.

CodePudding user response：

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    exclude-result-prefixes="xs"
    version="2.0">
    <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:for-each select = "paper/Question_01">
            <xsl:if test = "starts-with(normalize-space(translate(Question,'“','')), 'W')">
                <li>
                    <xsl:value-of select = "Question"/>
                </li>
            </xsl:if>                       
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>