If your "plain text file" contained XML you could use the document()
function as desribed here : 

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipcombxslt/
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/06/xslt.html

But, since your plain text is not XML (it has no closing tags for CIK
and NAME for example) you probably won't be able to extract the CIK
node content using XSLT.

It might work better though if you were able to preprocess your text
file to be actual XML 

You also *cannot* go to the web page and 'extract the title' using XML
http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000925645

It's not XML it's HTML4, and can't be read by an XML parser. So you
need to have some mechanism (such as running HTMLTidy on your web
server) to convert the HTML to real XML, or you need some other
scripting language such as ASP or PHP or ..... to extract the title
element from the HTML. PHP can execute fopen(url) on that web page,
you can then use a regular expression to extract the title.

Cheers - Neil


On Mon, 6 Jun 2005 08:07:17 -0700, "Frank"
<Frank@d...> wrote:

>I am stepping through an xslt stylesheet and transforming an xml file into 
>html output.  At some point in the xslt file I need to go to a plain text 
>file which is in the same location as the xslt file (C:\data\) and retrieve 
>the CIK.  The text file looks like this:
>
><SUBJECT-COMPANY> 
>      <CIK> 0000925645
>      <NAME> Big Corporation
></SUBJECT-COMPANY>
>
>and then I need to go to the webpage below and grab the Title value and plug 
>that into my html output.
>
>http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000925645
>
>Any ideas?