xslt retrieve information from <a> - html

Question

<div>
<a href="M_TestNamespace_StoredNumber_Swap``1_2_890a5ef1.htm">
Swap
<span class="languageSpecificText">
<span class="cs"><</span>
<span class="vb">(Of </span><span class="cpp"><</span>
<span class="fs"><'</span><span class="nu">(</span>
</span>
T
<span class="languageSpecificText">
<span class="cs">></span>
<span class="vb">)</span>
<span class="cpp">></span>
<span class="fs">></span>
<span class="nu">)</span>
</span>
</a>
<div>
I would like using XSLT and translate above into the result like this:
<div>
Swap(T)
<div>
FYI, the "(" and ")" are from <span class="nu"/>.

Answer 1

You might want to create a parameter to hold the 'nu' value.
<xsl:param name="lang" select="'nu'" />
Then, you would be able to extract the language specific text like so
<xsl:template match="span[#class='languageSpecificText']">
<xsl:value-of select="span[#class=$lang]" />
</xsl:template>
Here is the full XSLT
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html"/>
<xsl:param name="lang" select="'nu'" />
<xsl:template match="a">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="span[#class='languageSpecificText']">
<xsl:value-of select="span[#class=$lang]" />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="a/text()">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()" />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="#*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
When applied to your sample XML, the following is output
<div>Swap(T)</div>
Change the parameter to 'vb' and you get the following
<div>Swap(Of T)</div>

Answer 2

Try like so:
<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="div">
<xsl:element name="div">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(a/text()[1])"/>
<xsl:value-of select="(.//span/span[#class='nu'])[1]/text()"/>
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(a/text()[2])"/>
<xsl:value-of select="(.//span/span[#class='nu'])[2]/text()"/>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
I've assumed that the <div> is correctly closed :).

Answer 3

One of the shortest ways to generate the wanted result is:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:template match="a">
<div><xsl:apply-templates/></div>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="a/text() | span[#class='nu']/text()">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()"/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Explanation:
All text nodes are ignored by: <xsl:template match="text()"/> -- this effectively "deletes" them from the output.
Only the text-node children of a and span[#class='nu'] are treated differently (used to generate text-nodes in the output -- by the template matching: a/text() | span[#class='nu']/text().
The unwanted white-space in the text-node children of a is removed using the standard XPath function normalize-space()