Tera fn: XSLT extensions

Converts text with end of lines in a sequence of paragraphs nodes. This is the default behavior when the third parameter is omitted but it can also be used for different purpose

Example

This is a variation of the standard usage where the paragraph is delimited by a LineFeed followed by three spaces

 <!--> Creates paragraphs on 0a followed by 3 spaces </!-->

 <xmlText>

   <xsl:copy-of select="fn:paragraphs(Text,'p','&#xA;   ')/*" />

 </xmlText>

A different usage to generate an item’s list: it converts a character separated list (list or words separated by a – or a , or :) into an <item> list. This is what we have in the input file:

<Keywords>UK-Consumer-Online shopping</Keywords>

Here’s how we handle it:

 <xsl:if test="string(Keywords)">

   <keywords>

     <!--> Split the keywords list on "-" </!-->

     <xsl:copy-of select="fn:paragraphs(Keywords,'item','-')/*" />

           </keywords>

 </xsl:if>

The output will be:

<keywords>
   <item>UK</item>
   <item>Consumer</item>
   <item>Online shopping</item>
</keywords>

This function is commonly used to generate an abstract or summary of a piece of text or to display only a certain number of characters of a string

Example

Here we generate the summary element using the first 300 characters of the Text node:

 <summary>

   <xsl:value-of select="fn:trimText(Text,300,' ','...')" />

 </summary>

The replace function processes par1 looking for par2 and replacing it with par3.

fn:replace($something,'^[ ]+','')

Pay attention to is that the matching string (the second parameter par2) is a regular expression.

In the example above it matches all the trailing spaces at the beginning of a line so the result of the replace is the input string without eventual spaces at the beginning of each line.

Here’s another example of a very common replace:

 <xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>

   <title>

     <xsl:variable name="title" select="//apcm:ContentMetadata/apcm:SlugLine" />

     <xsl:variable name="temp" select="fn:replace(fn:replace($title, '‘', $apos),'’', $apos)" />

     <xsl:value-of select="fn:replace(fn:replace($temp, '“', '&quot;'),'”', '&quot;')" />

   </title>

In this example we used the trick to place the single quote into a variable in order to be able to output it into a quoted string and then a series of nesting replace.

The createGuid function generates a new global unique identifier (GUID) to be used as unique name, for example, into a <story>:

<story name="{fn:createGuid()}" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >

Apply a regular expression to text, returning the result as an XML fragment.

It returns a single empty XML element if the expression does NOT match the text.

If the expression matches the text, it returns a XML element with one sub-element (node[1]), containing the matched text, and one additional sub-element (node[2] node[3] node[n]) for each matched group.

Example

Here’s a sample that uses the applyRegExp to read a text wire captured from AFP:

<xsl:variable name="stories" select="fn:paragraphs(.,'story','GLGL')/*" />

   <xsl:for-each select="$stories">

    <xsl:variable name="groups" select="fn:applyRegExp(text(),'\x01(.*)\x1f(.*)\x13\x11(.*)\r\n\x02(.*)\r\n(.*)\x03','s')" />

     <xsl:if test="count($groups//group)&gt;0">

       <xsl:variable name="sourceId" select="$groups/*[2]" />

      <xsl:variable name="catCode" select="substring($groups/*[3],9)" />

        <xsl:variable name="slug" select="$groups/*[4]" />

        <xsl:variable name="text" select="$groups/*[5]" />

       <xsl:variable name="textParas" select="fn:paragraphs($text,'p','&#xD;&#xA;&#x9;  ')" />

        <xsl:variable name="textNodes" select="msxsl:node-set($textParas/*)" />

        <xsl:variable name="header">

The ‘xmlMode’ is object type defined in GN4Archive.xsd (so specific to Tark4 and GN4). Objects of these type are the different possible ‘rendering modes’ – i.e. outputs – i.e. destinations for XML text. They are basically just a name and a description identifying a rendering mode that the system ‘knows’ about.

The xmlFormat object type has a attribute ‘renders’ that is a multi-reference to xmlMode objects. Each reference has an extra attribute ‘xslt’ that contain the XSL transformation to be used to convert XML texts in that format to the referenced rendering mode.