XSLT and line feeds
I am using XSLT to reformat some XML to (a) rotate the elements into attributes and (b) sort everything alphabetically. It works to EXCEPT attributes all on one line. I realize this is usually preferred, but in this case I need each attribute to appear on a separate line when I open the file in Notepad ++ (or whatever).
I can add XML strings with xsl: text, but that's not what I want. The value-of separator attribute does not work (this is in the .NET XSL library). I want, for example, "non-XML" strings. a view that a non-XML editor will interpret to display each attribute on its own line. Any ideas?
I don't think you can do this with XSLT. What you are looking for is a nice looking XML printer. Why aren't you doing XSLT processing? I usually stream things like this through " xmllint --format -
", but that doesn't do the formatting I want. How hard can you roll yourself? Especially if you only need to execute a subset of the XML you are using (this stuff gets easier if you don't need namespaces, etc.).
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It's not clear what you mean with "XML" and "non-XML" line feeds, but this is what you want:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<node>
<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</node>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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Are you referring to newlines between attributes, or within attribute values? If the latter, it is simply impossible to do, due to the XML attribute normalization requirements :
This is because XML 1.0 requires newline characters in attribute values to be normalized to spaces, but requires newline references not to be normalized. Attribute values in the data model represent the value of the attribute after normalization. If a newline occurring in an attribute value in a tree was outputted as a newline character rather than as a character reference, then the attribute value in the tree generated by reprocessing the XML would contain a space rather than a newline, which would mean that the tree is not displayed correctly.
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