use xsl to output plain text

Question

I needed to use XSL to generate simple plain text output from XML. Since I didn't find any good, concise example online, I decided to post my solution here. Any links referring to a better example would of course be appreciated:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" >     <xsl:output method="text" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>     <xsl:template match="/">         <xsl:for-each select="script/command" xml:space="preserve">at -f <xsl:value-of select="username"/> <xsl:value-of select="startTime/@hours"/>:<xsl:value-of select="startTime/@minutes"/> <xsl:value-of select="startDate"/><xsl:text> </xsl:text></xsl:for-each>      </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> 

A few important things that helped me out here:

1. the use of xsl:output to omit the standard declaration at the beginning of the output document
2. the use of the xml:space="preserve" attribute to preserve any whitespace I wrote within the xsl:for-each tag. This also required me to write all code within the for-each tag, including that tag as well, on a single line (with the exception of the line break).
3. the use of to insert a line break - again I had to omit standard xml indenting here.

The resulting and desired output for this xslt was:

at -f alluser 23:58 17.4.2010
at -f ggroup67 7:58 28.4.2010
at -f ggroup70 15:58 18.4.2010
at -f alluser 23:58 18.4.2010
at -f ggroup61 7:58 22.9.2010
at -f ggroup60 23:58 21.9.2010
at -f alluser 3:58 22.9.2010

As I said, any suggestions of how to do this more elegantly would be appreciated.

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FOLLOW-UP 2011-05-08:

Here's the type of xml I am treating:

<script xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="script.xsd">     <command>         <username>alluser</username>         <startTime minutes="58" hours="23"/>         <startDate>17.4.2010</startDate>     </command> </script> 

Answer 1

• You can define a template to match on script/command and eliminate the xsl:for-each
• concat() can be used to shorten the expression and save you from explicitly inserting so many <xsl:text> and <xsl:value-of> elements.
• The use of an entity reference 
 for the carriage return, rather than relying on preserving the line-break between your <xsl:text> element is a bit more safe, since code formatting won't mess up your line breaks. Also, for me, it reads as an explicit line-break and is easier to understand the intent.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"  xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" >     <xsl:output method="text" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>      <xsl:template match="script/command">         <xsl:value-of select="concat('at -f '                     ,username                     ,' '                     ,startTime/@hours                     ,':'                     ,startTime/@minutes                     ,' '                     ,startDate                     ,'&#xA;')"/>     </xsl:template>  </xsl:stylesheet>