hi all,



I am trying to write code that will treat a variable as a node.  If 
a variable is empty, I want the stylesheet to think it's 
non-existent rather than existing, but empty. For example, I am 
trying to parse out a string from element, foo. If the value exists, 
I want it to print <test>value of foo</test>.  If it doesn't exist, 
I don't want it to print out anything. Right now, it still prints 
out the tags because the variable exists but is empty at this point. 
Is there any way to check for variable existence like one can with 
nodes?  So if the variable is empty after parsing out the element, I 
want the stylesheet to think that there is no variable. The larger 
issue is that we have templates that process nodes and print output 
if they exist or if the nodes exist, but there is no value.  There 
are some nodes to which we do some processing or parsing where we 
need variables(like with foo in the example below), when we pass 
these variables to templates, I want these templates to treat these 
variables like nodes.  Thanks for your help!




stylesheet:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">



<xsl:template match="/">
<xml>
<xsl:for-each select="//foo">
        <xsl:variable name="test">
                <xsl:if test="contains(.,'em')">
                <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(.,'em: ')"/></xsl:if>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:call-template name="runTest">
                <xsl:with-param name="test" select="$test"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:for-each>
</xml>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="runTest">
        <xsl:param name="test"/>

        <xsl:if test="$test">
            <test>
                <xsl:value-of select="$test"/>
          </test>
        </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

xml file:
<xml>
<foo>bar1</foo>
<foo>bar;em: bar2</foo>
</xml>

This is the result I get:
<xml xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
        <test />
        <test>bar2</test>
</xml>





Esha Datta






Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library