Last change 25/04/2014
It happened already quite often, that I had to "misuse" a field ina xml-based cms solution. For example I created a comma seperated list in order to have all information available in xsl. This snippet shows you how to take such a list and play with it as if it were a subtree - in xslt 1.0.
The template
This template simply takes a string with seperators and creates <token>Stringpart</token> subtree out of it.
<!--
split a string into tokens using a seperator
-->
<xsl:template name="tokenizeString">
<xsl:param name="string"/>
<xsl:param name="separator"/>
<xsl:if test="string-length($string) > 0">
<xsl:variable name="before-separator" select="substring-before($string, $separator)"/>
<xsl:variable name="after-separator" select="substring-after($string, $separator)"/>
<xsl:choose>
<!-- separator not found in string -->
<xsl:when test="string-length($before-separator)=0 and string-length($after-separator)=0">
<token>
<xsl:value-of select="$string"/>
</token>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<token>
<xsl:value-of select="$before-separator"/>
</token>
<xsl:call-template name="tokenizeString">
<xsl:with-param name="string" select="$after-separator"/>
<xsl:with-param name="separator" select="$separator"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
Usage
In order to use this kind of subtree you need to use a xslt extension
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common" extension-element-prefixes="exsl" exclude-result-prefixes="exsl" version="1.0">
<xsl:variable name="sTmp">
<xsl:call-template name="tokenizeString">
<xsl:with-param name="separator" select="'|'"/>
<xsl:with-param name="string" select="description"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="s" select="exsl:node-set($sTmp)"/>
<ul>
<xsl:for-each select="$sTmp">
<li><xsl:value-of select="."/></li>
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>