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xslt-2.0

unescape text for subsequent xslt 2 processing

I get an input file hosting elements like

<item>
<Description>
    Intro 1
    &lt;b&gt;Title&lt;/b&gt;
    Intro 2
    &lt;ul&gt;
    &lt;li&gt;item 1&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;li&gt;&lt;b&gt;item 2&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
    &lt;/ul&gt;
    Finish
</Description>
</item>

I would like to create an xslt2 template or function converting this to a node() like

<item>
<Description>
    Intro 1
    <b>Title</b>
    Intro 2
    <ul>
    <li>item 1</li>
    <li><b>item 2</b></li>
    </ul>
    Finish
</Description>
</item>

to process it further.

Any recommendation how to achieve this?

Solution

  • David Carlisle implemented an HTML parser in XSLT 2, you can find it at https://github.com/davidcarlisle/web-xslt/blob/master/htmlparse/htmlparse.xsl and use it as e.g.

    <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    xmlns:d="data:,dpc"
    exclude-result-prefixes="#all"
    version="3.0">
    
  <xsl:import href="https://github.com/davidcarlisle/web-xslt/raw/master/htmlparse/htmlparse.xsl"/>

  <xsl:mode on-no-match="shallow-copy"/>

  <xsl:template match="Description">
      <xsl:copy>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="d:htmlparse(., '', true())/node()"/>
      </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
  
</xsl:stylesheet>

    to get a result like

    <item>
<Description>
    Intro 1
    <b>Title</b>
    Intro 2
    <ul>
    <li>item 1</li>
    <li><b>item 2</b></li>
    Finish
</ul></Description>

    If the input were well-formed XML you could also use XSLT 3/XPath 3's parse-xml-fragment function but without the closing </ul> your sample can't be parsed as XML.