XML to CSV with XSLT - Grouping nodes

Question

So I\'ve got an XML file I\'ve generated from a php curl response that is then transformed to CSV such that each mods element below is one line. I\'ve got some CSV using the sty

Answer 1

One way to do this is firstly change your XSLT to only select the elements which do not have a preceding-sibling with the same child name (i.e select elements that are the 'first' in each group)

<xsl:for-each select="*[name(*) != name(preceding-sibling::*[1]/*)]">

Then, you can define a variable to get the following sibling if (and only if) it has the same name, so you can then check if the current element is indeed in a group of more than 1.

<xsl:variable name="nextWithSameName" 
              select="following-sibling::*[1][name(*)=name(current()/*)]"/>
<xsl:if test="$nextWithSameName">**</xsl:if>

(I am not sure if you actually wanted the ** in the final results, or whether they are just there to highlight the group! I am keeping them in my example, but obviously it will be easy enough to remove the relevant lines of code).

To group together the following-siblings with the same name, you could call a recursive template for the first following-sibling

<xsl:apply-templates select="$nextWithSameName" mode="group"/>

Then, within this template you would recursively call it where the immediate following sibling has the same name

<xsl:template match="*" mode="group">
   <xsl:text>;</xsl:text>
   <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
   <xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::*[1][name(*)=name(current()/*)]" />
</xsl:template>

Try the following XSLT

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output method="text" encoding="iso-8859-1"/>
   <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

   <xsl:template match="/*/*">
      <xsl:for-each select="*[name(*) != name(preceding-sibling::*[1]/*)]">
         <xsl:variable name="nextWithSameName" select="following-sibling::*[1][name(*)=name(current()/*)]"/>
         <xsl:if test="position() &gt; 1">,    </xsl:if>
         <xsl:if test="$nextWithSameName">**</xsl:if>
         <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
         <xsl:apply-templates select="$nextWithSameName" mode="group"/>
         <xsl:if test="$nextWithSameName">**</xsl:if>
      </xsl:for-each>
      <xsl:text>&#xD;</xsl:text>
   </xsl:template>

   <xsl:template match="*" mode="group">
      <xsl:text>;</xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="following-sibling::*[1][name(*)=name(current()/*)]" />
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Now, if you could use XSLT 2.0, things become much, much easier, as you could use the xsl:for-each-group construct which, among other things, comes with an operation to 'group-adjacent'. And you could also do away with the recursive template by using the improved xsl:value-of which would have a 'separator' property to use when multiple elements are select.

For XSLT 2.0, the following should also work

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text" encoding="iso-8859-1"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

    <xsl:template match="/*/*">
        <xsl:for-each-group select="*" group-adjacent="name(*)">
            <xsl:if test="position() &gt; 1">,    </xsl:if>
            <xsl:if test="current-group()[2]">**</xsl:if>
            <xsl:value-of select="current-group()" separator=";" />
            <xsl:if test="current-group()[2]">**</xsl:if>
        </xsl:for-each-group >
        <xsl:text>&#xD;</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>