Gentlemen,
 
Thank you for your suggestions and I finally worked out the reason why the 2 values fishing, rabbit were not been picked up after debugging. It turned out that there are two different types of Hobbie(s) elements which is shown as follows:
The only difference between the 2 matching pattern elements is the additional letter 's'. I used the following matching patterns to pick up all values for both elements:
 
<xsl:template match="ns:p[ns:strong='Hobbie:']|ns:p[ns:strong='Hobbies:']"> 
<xsl:for-each select="ns:a">
<hobbie><xsl:value-of select="."/></hobbie> 
</xsl:for-each> 
</xsl:template> 
Note that the matching name Hobbie is only an arbitray name that I used in position for the actual element name. As a result, it was not as obvious to distinguish between Hobby and Hobbies.
 
Now the only question left is the second half ( ii ) of the original post included below:
 <p> <strong>Hobbie:</strong> 
(Out-door adventures)<a shape="rect"href=http://www.hobbies.com/fishingtitle="Shark Hunting">fishing</a></p><p> <strong>Hobbies:</strong> <a shape="rect"href=http://www.hobbies.com/fishingtitle="Shark Hunting">fishing</a> 
(Out-door adventures)<a shape="rect"href=http://www.hobbies.com/huntingtitle="Animal">rabbit</a></p>( ii ) I also like to add a default generic value for any missing element. Say if there are no 
<p><strong>Hobbies:</strong></p> in such document, yet I still would like to generate a 
null element such as <hobbies>Unknown</hobbies>. The intended stylesheet should look 
like the following but couldn’t get it working still:
<xsl:template match="/">
<employee>
<xsl:apply-templates select="//ns:p"/>
</employee>
</xsl:template>
<xsl: choose>
<xsl: when test="ns:p[ns:strong='Hobbies:']">
<xsl:template match="ns:p[ns:strong='Hobbies:']"> 
<xsl:for-each select="text()[normalize-space() != '']"> 
<hobbies><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()"/></hobbies> 
</xsl:for-each> 
</xsl:template></xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<hobbies>Unknown</hobbies> 
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl: choose>
 However, this syntax does not conform with XSLT stylesheet.
Any suggestion would be much appreciated.
Thanks again,
Jack



________________________________
From: Michael Kay <mike@s...>
To: Jack Bush <netbeansfan@y...>; xml-dev@l...
Sent: Wednesday, 4 February, 2009 12:40:53 AM
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] XSTL stylesheet workarounds for exceptions


 
My next step would be to debug this stylesheet but any other suggestion would be more than welcome.
 
 
I rather assumed that you only posted to the list after failing to debug the stylesheet.
 
Your next step might be to post a complete but minimal source document and stylesheet that demonstrate the problem.
 
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


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