XML to XHTML transformation - html

Question

I need to transform a XML to XHTML. Within the XML are multiple paragraphs and embedded quotations e.g.
<para>SomeText</para>
<para><quote>SomeText</quote></para>
<para>SomeText</para>
I tried this:
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="//text/para">
<xsl:for-each select="//text">
<xsl:for-each select="//para">
<p><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></p>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="//text/para[quote]">
<xsl:for-each select="//text">
<xsl:for-each select="//para/quote">
<p><q><xsl:value-of select="text()"/></q></p>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:when>
</xsl:choose>
The second condition simply gets ignored however.

Answer 1

As #LarsH indicates, avoid <xsl:for-each>. Use template matching.
This simple transformation:
<xsl:transform version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="para">
<p><xsl:apply-templates /></p>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="quote">
<q><xsl:apply-templates /></q>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
will turn this:
<text>
<para>SomeText</para>
<para><quote>SomeText</quote></para>
<para>SomeText</para>
</text>
into
<p>SomeText</p>
<p><q>SomeText</q></p>
<p>SomeText</p>
Further reading here on SO:
What are the differences between 'call-template' and 'apply-templates' in XSL?
Why does XSLT output all text by default?
What is the default select of XSLT apply-templates?

Answer 2

The problem is you're using XPath expressions that ignore context (aside from the context document), i.e. expressions that start with //. So if you have any <para> element anywhere in the document that has a <quote> child element, the first condition will always be true and the second condition will never be reached.
Really you want to move the for-each loop (or probably better, a set of templates with match patterns and apply-templates) outside of the choose/when conditions. In fact you will probably not need a choose/when at all, once you have the right templates.
(Moving in some info from comments)
XSLT and XPath are sufficiently complex that it's really worth learning the basics before trying to get something working by trial-and-error. You'll save a lot of time that way. For a general introduction I would recommend
How XSLT Works
Then for more advanced discussion of xsl:for-each vs. xsl:apply-templates, see
Jeni Tennison's blog post Matching templates, named templates or for-each? My rules of thumb
differences between for-each and templates in xsl?