New Lines to HTML Line Breaks Using XSLT - html

Question

I have the following XML:
<RichText>
Text
Text
Text
</RichText>
I would like to output the following HTML using XSLT 1.0 (2.0 if I really really have to):
<p>
Text<br/>
Text<br/>
Text
</p>
I've tried using the following XSL which gets close:
<xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:param name="text" select="."/>
<!-- Because we would rely on $text containing a line break when using
substring-before($text,'
') and the last line might not have a
trailing line break, we append one before doing substring-before(). -->
<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(concat($text,'
'),'
')"/>
<br/>
<xsl:if test="contains($text,'
')">
<xsl:apply-templates select=".">
<xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text,'
')"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:template>
This outputs:
<p><br>
Text<br>
Text<br>
Text<br>
<br></p>

Answer 1

For your XSLT 1.0 solution, I think all you need is some xsl:if tests to test if there is non-white space text before and after the current line you are handling.
Try this XSLT
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="html" />
<xsl:template match="RichText">
<p><xsl:apply-templates /></p>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:param name="text" select="."/>
<xsl:variable name="startText" select="substring-before(concat($text,'
'),'
')" />
<xsl:variable name="nextText" select="substring-after($text,'
')"/>
<xsl:if test="normalize-space($startText)">
<xsl:value-of select="$startText"/>
<xsl:if test="normalize-space($nextText)">
<br />
</xsl:if>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:if test="contains($text,'
')">
<xsl:apply-templates select=".">
<xsl:with-param name="text" select="$nextText"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 2

Try the following script:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="RichText">
<p>
<xsl:variable name="txt" select="tokenize(., '
')"/>
<xsl:variable name="len" select="count($txt)"/>
<xsl:for-each select="subsequence($txt, 2, $len - 2)">
<xsl:value-of select="replace(replace(.,'\s+$',''),'^\s+','')"/>
<xsl:if test="position() < last()">
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><br/></xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>
</p>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
I used XSLT 2.0, as a version MUCH simpler to write.
It is possible to rewrite it using XSLT 1.0, but you must use equivalent
1.0 solutions for:
tokenization,
subsequence,
and trimming.