Alter text() while preserving children of element using XSLT-CodePudding

Considering the following example:

<root>
 <a>foo
  <b>bar</b>
 </a>
</root>

How can I change the text() of <a> to "fee" while preserving the child element <b> with all its children, attributes, etc.?

Using <xsl:value-of select="."/>, only the text() is processed, correct? Using <xsl:apply-templates/>, I cannot alter the text(), e.g. via replace function. So how can I change both. Note that my actual use case is more complex, with multiple children and the text() not necessarily in the first position.

Thank you!

CodePudding user response：

You can define templates which match text nodes, not just elements. You could make a template which matches text nodes which are children of a elements, e.g.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="3.0">

  <xsl:mode on-no-match="shallow-copy"/>

  <xsl:template match="a/text()">
     <xsl:value-of select="replace(., 'foo', 'fee')"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Result:

<root>
 <a>fee
  <b>bar</b>
 </a>
</root>

By the way, you don't mention what version of XSLT you're running though you mention the replace function which implies you're version 2 or later. That stylesheet is version 3.0 but the only thing not supported in XSLT 2 is the mode element which is effectively just an identity template.

To answer your question about <xsl:value-of select="."/>; what happens is that xsl:value-of converts the current node (.) to a string. If the current node is an element (like your a element), then its text value is the result of concatenating all its descendant text nodes, not just the child text nodes; i.e. it equals string-join(.//text()), and not string-join(./text()).

CodePudding user response：

You can use this XSLT-1.0 template in combination with the identity template:

<xsl:template match="a">
  <xsl:copy><xsl:apply-templates select="@*" />fee
    <xsl:apply-templates select="node()[not(self::text()[1])]" />  
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

This should replace the first text() node of the <a> element.