xslt convert xml string in xml elements

Question

here's a tricky one.

I have the following XML

<test>
     <testElement SomeAttribute="<otherxml><otherElement>test test</otherElement></otherxml>">
      </testElement>
</test>

Using XSLT, I want to transform this XML to have the following result.

<test>
     <testElement>
        <SomeAttributeTransformedToElement>
          <otherxml>
               <otherElement>test test</otherElement>
          </otherxml>
        </SomeAttributeTransformedToElement>
      </testElement>
</test>

Basically, some text in an attribute must be transformed to actual elements in the final XML

Any ideas how to achieve that in XSLT?

Alex

Answer 1

You can achieve that by disabling output escaping. However, note that your input document is not a valid XML document (< is illegal in attribute values and needs escaping). I therefore changed your input document as follows:

Input document

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<test>
  <testElement SomeAttribute="&lt;otherxml>&lt;otherElement>test test&lt;/otherElement>&lt;/otherxml>">
  </testElement>
</test>

XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

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

  <xsl:template match="@SomeAttribute">
    <SomeAttributeTransformedToElement>
      <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
    </SomeAttributeTransformedToElement>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Be aware that with disable-output-escaping="yes" there is no longer a guarantee that the produced output document is a well-formed XML document.