string processing with xsl:apply-templates

Question

I have a xml that looks like this,

<Parent> Running text with marked up entities like 
  <Child>Entity1</Child> 
 and, text in the middle too, and
  <Child> Entity2 </Child>
</Parent>

I have to preserve the line breaks and indentation when rendering the parent, but also apply a highlighting template to every child tag.

Now, the moment I capture the contents of the parent tag in a variable to do some string processing in XSL, I lose the underlying xml structure and cant apply the highlighting template to the children.

Whereas, I cant think of any other way to preserve the line breaks and indentation of the text contained in the parent tag.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:preserve-space elements="*"/>
    <xsl:template match="Parent">
        <div>
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="preserve"/>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="text()" mode="preserve" name="split">
        <xsl:param name="pString" select="."/>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains($pString,'&#xA;')">
                <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($pString,'&#xA;')"/>
                <br/>
                <xsl:call-template name="split">
                    <xsl:with-param name="pString"
                     select="substring-after($pString,'&#xA;')"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:value-of select="$pString"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="Child" mode="preserve">
        <b>
            <xsl:apply-templates mode="preserve"/>
        </b>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Output:

<div> Running text with marked up entities like<br/> <b>Entity1</b><br/> and, text in the middle too, and<br/> <b> Entity2 </b><br/></div>

Render as:

Running text with marked up entities like
Entity1
and, text in the middle too, and
Entity2

Edit: Better example preserving whitespace only text nodes.

Answer 2

You haven't shown any code, which makes it rather difficult to tell what you have done wrong, but a common mistake that would account for the symptoms described is to write

<xsl:variable name="x">
  <xsl:value-of select="some/node/path"/>
</xsl:variable>

when you should have written

<xsl:variable name="x" select="some/node/path"/>

Please, in future, don't tell us your code doesn't work without showing us your code.