XSLT and embedded tags in text.

[Heath Lilley]

I am having a problem with XSLT and I was hoping that you could shed some light on it.
I have a line of text I am referencing in a XML document...

<Text>Remove existing sheet metal at a width of <input_text/> coping and store for reuse.</Text>

I have been able to find this node via a template AND I can identify the input_text tag as well. What I want to do is replace the input_text tag with a real HTML tag. I am doing this like so...
Find/output the substring before the tag.
Then, output the html input element in place of the tag.
And finally, output the substring after the tag.
The xslt code in question.

<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(text(), '<')"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="input_text"/><BR/>     
<xsl:value-of select="substring-after(text(), '>')"/>

The above template defined.

<xsl:template match="input_text">
 <input type="text" name="input_text_'+@id"/>
</xsl:template>

I looked at the xpath functions and I know I can't use the < or > brackets, I tried escaping the brackets < and > but it isn't associating the tag bracets with the codes.
My above code will NOT output any of the substrings. It does output a textbox though.
Am I trying to do something that xslt can't do? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
[ October 22, 2003: Message edited by: Heath Lilley ]

[Tony Yan]

I think the problem is that text() will only give you the text value, so that the substring function will not even find the <, however you define it. the value of text() of <xyz/> is empty, I believe.
Maybe you should try to get all the nodes by combining * and text()? and then go thru each node, if a node has a local-name() is input_text, then insert your html code. In this way, you avoid using substring() etc, which is not that reliable in case that you add more nodes in.
Hope it helps.
Tony

[Tony Yan]

Try this, it will give you a good idea on how the text() and * work. You can derive from this to get a solution, I hope.

 
<xsl:stylesheet version = "1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<table border="1">
<tr>
<th>Node Name</th>
<th>Node Text value</th>
</tr>
<xsl:for-each select="//Text/* | //Text/text()">
<tr>
<td><xsl:value-of select="local-name()"/></td>
<td><xsl:value-of select="."/></td>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>

</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
 

[Heath Lilley]

Thank you for the responses. I think I figured it out. I forget where I read it but it seems that text() only returns the text between the start element and the next element NOT the matching ending element.
I have access to changing the xml schema structure so what we did was and another set of element tags to separate the plain text from any embedded tags.

I was oringinally hoping to avoid this but I don't think it was possible.

<Text><pt>Remove existing sheet metal at a width of </pt><input_text/><pt> coping and store for reuse.</pt></Text>

This allows me to get the text and the input element in the xslt.