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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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XSLT sort puzzle 4 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • You’re defining two identity copies, one on the root element and one for everything else; why? Next, you write a template for //* which is equivalent to matching * (but I haven’t slept and it’s 6AM, so I might be making a mistake). And finally, you say making the D nodes sort together with all the others would be a lot of work, when actually it’s less work than you’re already doing. Overall:

    <xsl:stylesheet
        xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
     

    • Thanks. Tested and it works. I bow to your superior XSLT-fu (mine needs a lot of work). My only consolation is that I've seen worse code than mine from someone else who was trying to do the same sort of thing (and who wasn't even yet trying to sort by name()). I still find XSLT non-intuitive, e.g., how does it decide which templates to match, does it matter what in what order the templates come, and so why doesn't the first (identity) template above just match and copy everything unchanged?

      • Don’t worry, you’re in good company. Almost no one groks XSLT properly. (This is probably because every single XSLT tutorial is terrible junk.) Most of the transforms I see are seriously suboptimal, and a very large fraction of them are really atrocious. There’s a lot of cargo cult and programming by coincide in the XSLT world. Your attempt was quite decent by those standards. :-)

        Actually, the way XSLT processing happens is very simple, but because of the implicit default templates, it

        • Ugh, even a multitude of previewings did not protect me from submitting the comment with a whole bunch of small grammatical and spelling mistakes. “It’s value?” Argh. My face is melting off. I’m not stupid – I swear!

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