xslt flattening out child elements in a DocBook para element

Question

I am transforming some generated DocBook xml (from Doxygen) to my companies xml which is really a subset of DocBook. There is a para element like the following:

Answer 1

I had to correct a bit of your XML example so that it was well-formed. But the following:

    <xsl:template match="para">
        <xsl:for-each select="node()">
            <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="self::text() and normalize-space(.)!=''">
                    <xsl:element name="para">
                        <xsl:apply-templates select="."/>
                    </xsl:element>
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>
                    <xsl:apply-templates select="."/>
                </xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
        </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="text()">
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="literallayout">
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="table">
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
    </xsl:template>

Outputs:

<para>some text..... </para>
<literallayout>
</literallayout>
<para> more text.... </para>
<table> ... </table>
<para> even more text </para>
<table>...</table>
<literallayout>text also look here <link xlink:href="http://someurl.com"/></literallayout>
<para> more text. </para>

I hope that helps.

Answer 2

I should use these templates:

<xsl:template match="para">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="node()" mode="flat" />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*" mode="flat">
    <xsl:copy-of select="." />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()[normalize-space()!='']" mode="flat">
    <para>
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </para>
</xsl:template> 

<xsl:template match="text()[normalize-space()='']" mode="flat" />

Answer 3

You can turn every text node within a para element into its own para using something like

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy><xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" /></xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="para">
    <xsl:apply-templates />
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="para/text()">
    <para><xsl:value-of select="." /></para>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

but this may not be sufficient if you only want to break up the para at certain child elements and not others.