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 refer

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.

---

<?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>

Answer 2

Just for fun: this can be done in a very general and compact way:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:output method="text"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

    <xsl:template match="*">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
        <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="username">
       at -f <xsl:apply-templates select="*|@*"/>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on this XML document:

<script>
 <command>
  <username>John</username>
  <startTime hours="09:" minutes="33"/>
  <startDate>05/05/2011</startDate>

  <username>Kate</username>
  <startTime hours="09:" minutes="33"/>
  <startDate>05/05/2011</startDate>

  <username>Peter</username>
  <startTime hours="09:" minutes="33"/>
  <startDate>05/05/2011</startDate>
 </command>
</script>

the wanted, correct result is produced:

   at -f 09:33 05/05/2011 
   at -f 09:33 05/05/2011 
   at -f 09:33 05/05/2011  

Note: This genaral approach is best applicable if all the data to be output is contained in text nodes -- not in attributes.