XSLT - Iterate through node-set

Question

I have a xml like this:

<root>
<row>
    <col name="col1">&lt;root&gt;&lt;row&gt;&lt;col name=&quot;COL_NAME_1&quot;&gt;col_value_1&lt;/col&gt;;&lt;/row&gt;&lt;/root&gt;</col>
    <col name="col2">&lt;root&gt;&lt;row&gt;&lt;col name=&quot;COL_NAME_2&quot;&gt;col_value_2&lt;/col&gt;;&lt;/row&gt;&lt;/root&gt;</col>
</row></root>

I need to get escaped collection from col1 and iterate through its rows. I'm using exsl:node-set function. Here is my simplified xsl:

<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:variable name="collection" select="exsl:node-set(./root/row/col[@name='col1'])" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
<xsl:for-each select="($collection)/root/row">
    <!-- ... -->
</xsl:for-each></xsl:template>

I can correctly read value from variable $collection using xsl:value-of function but i can't iterate over it as if there were no rows. Any ideas what am I doing wrong?

Which processor are you using? – michael.hor257k Mar 31 '15 at 15:33 — michael.hor257k, Mar 31 '15 at 15:33

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '15 at 21:55

If the author of this XML had wanted you to see elements like root and row inside the col element, they wouldn't have escaped the angle brackets. Because they are escaped, there's no structure here, only text. The operation of getting structure from the text is called parsing. XSLT 3.0 has a function parse-xml() to parse text and create a tree structure; earlier versions don't, though your vendor might provide extensions or you might be able to write your own.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 31 '15 at 14:53

The node-set() function doesn't parse. Your $collection variable is a node-set consisting of a temporary document node with one col child.

Saxon has an extension function called parse() that does what you want, as do some other XSLT processors. I have also seen some attempts at coding this in pure XSLT, but don't know if there's a good implementation.

XSLT - Iterate through node-set

2 Answers2