Hello
I would like help in creating an xsl (and to flatten out the learning curve). I’m new to using xsl, but have good experience with dom trees and xml. Using xsl looks like it can do many things I have been coding manually. What I need now is to take a xml doc and remove all attributes and empty tags. (I consider empty tags as tag without any data). To help illustrate this, below is a sample of the input/source xml and the resulting xml.
xml source
<Sales_ticket>
<Sales_ticket_header>
<Sales_ticket_header_Trans
<Sales_ticket_header_Store
<Sales_ticket_header_Regis
<Sales_ticket_header_Trans
<Sales_ticket_header_Trans
<Sales_ticket_header_Polle
<Sales_ticket_header_Ticke
<Sales_ticket_header_Recep
<Sales_ticket_header_Emplo
<Sales_ticket_header_Custo
<Sales_ticket_header_price
<Sales_ticket_header_POS_s
</Sales_ticket_header>
<Sales_ticket_detail>
<Sales_ticket_detail_Ticke
<Sales_ticket_detail_Emplo
<Sales_ticket_detail_Detai
<Sales_ticket_detail_Retai
<Sales_ticket_detail_Retai
<Sales_ticket_detail_Subse
<Sales_ticket_detail_List_
<Sales_ticket_detail_Quant
<Sales_ticket_detail_Item_
</Sales_ticket_detail>
<Payment_detail>
<Payment_detail_Ticket_num
<Payment_detail_Payment_ty
<Payment_detail_Amount_ten
<Payment_detail_Amount_neg
<Payment_detail_Gift_certi
<Payment_detail_Change_rec
<Payment_detail_Change_amo
<Credit_card_detail>
<Credit_card_detail_Ticket
<Credit_card_detail_Charge
</Credit_card_detail>
</Payment_detail>
</Sales_ticket>
desired xml result
<Sales_ticket>
<Sales_ticket_header>
<Sales_ticket_header_Polle
<Sales_ticket_header_Ticke
<Sales_ticket_header_Emplo
<Sales_ticket_header_Custo
<Sales_ticket_header_price
<Sales_ticket_header_POS_s
</Sales_ticket_header>
<Sales_ticket_detail>
<Sales_ticket_detail_Ticke
<Sales_ticket_detail_Emplo
<Sales_ticket_detail_Detai
<Sales_ticket_detail_servi
<Sales_ticket_detail_servi
<Sales_ticket_detail_Subse
<Sales_ticket_detail_List_
<Sales_ticket_detail_Quant
<Sales_ticket_detail_Item_
</Sales_ticket_detail>
<Payment_detail>
<Payment_detail_Ticket_num
<Payment_detail_Payment_ty
<Payment_detail_Amount_ten
<Payment_detail_Amount_neg
<Payment_detail_Gift_certi
<Payment_detail_Change_rec
<Payment_detail_Change_amo
</Payment_detail>
</Sales_ticket>
Basically I’m trying to reduce the document size before sending it on its way.
Here is what I got so far, it seems to just remove the attributes, but not the empty tags. Not sure what tells it to remove the attributes either. So 500 points for one that does both, with comments telling what part does what. Thanks.
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.o
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="no"/
<xsl:template match="* | /">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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Hi cjferris,
have a look at this question,
http://www.experts-exchang
At the end it has an XSLT that strips all the empty elements,
but also its parents if they become empty because of the removal
If you remove the template for attributes, it does what you need
Cheers!
cjferris,
sorry MetalMickey, didn't realise you already answered.
Your solution will not tackle elements deeper in the hierarchy, eg. children of Payment_Detail
but you are right about the test
you can of course do the test in the apply templates
Here is the solution from the above mentioned question,
adapted to remove attributes as well
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.o
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template
match="node()[descendant-o
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@*"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Here is how it works
There are three templates
- match='text()' copies the value of every text node
- match='@*' is an empty template for every attribute (@* is the attribute wildcard) no operation so deleted
- match="node()[descendant-o
is a template for every element that either has some text itself, or a descendent with some text content
- [] is a predicate, so it restricts the node
- descendant-or-self::* is the self node or a descendant, wildcard for the node-name
- new [] predicate stringlength of that element (after space normalisation) more than zero
(this means <a> </a> would be removed too, if that is not OK, remove the normalize-space function))
inside this template, there is a <xsl:copy> copying the tags, an apply-template for all the attributes (could be left out, I just made the attribute processing explicit, because you wanted to know) I do apply templates for the attributes and then explicitely do nothing with them for showing you
and then I apply templates the node
hope this is clear enough
for an XSLT tutorial, see www.w3schools.com/XSLT
cheers
correct URLs are a blessing :-)
http://www.w3schools.com/x
Very close
Metalmickey solution didn't work, It threw the following exception:
javax.xml.transform.Transf
Gertones works but adds, leaves blank lines where the empty tags where removed. For example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<Sales_ticket>
<Sales_ticket_header>
<Sales_ticket_header_Polle
<Sales_ticket_header_Ticke
<Sales_ticket_header_Recep
I pass the resulting DOM document to my DOMTreeWalker and you can see there remains a text node at these blank lines. How can these be removed?
Getones solution did technically meet my requirements since the tags are removed. I failed to specify to also to remove the text nodes with the empty tags. So I will accept this answer, plus he explained how it worked like I asked.
Getones, I would appreciate a follow up with the template showing how to remove these text nodes.
Thanks.
There is one line you should add,
stripping the spaces in all affected higher level elements
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.o
<xsl:strip-space elements="Sales_ticket Sales_ticket_header Sales_ticket_detail Payment_detail Credit_card_detail"/>
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
...
does the job for me
That worked. But the doc is no longer indented.
One thing I found out digging into the DOM tree and the xml is that the text nodes are created from the CR/LF at the end of each line in the xml document. I deleted these in the doc (making it unreadable and thus not a solution) and that worked too.
Your follow up above works, but that is hardcoding for that particular xml. We will have almost a 100 different xml coming through for each service we have, Sales_ticket is just one of those services.
thanks
Last comment, total solution found.
adding <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
and then making the xml look pretty again by switching indenting on on the format of the
serializer does the trick. Case closed
// Serialize DOM tree
OutputFormat format = new OutputFormat(doc);
format.setIndenting(true);
Thanks all.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: metalmickeyPosted on 2005-11-29 at 09:33:34ID: 15381780
could you test the string length of all children of sales ticket?
<xsl:template match="Sales_ticket/*">
<xsl:if test ="string-length(., !=0)">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
MM