blog.humaneguitarist.org

Sometimes in life – or coding projects – there are regrets.

But there is cake, too.

Anyway, for a current project I want to place some XSL inside an XML config file.

But of course, you can't just drop XML inside XML without coating it in something.

So for another project, PubMed2XL, I did something like this:

<cell>{{?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?}}
  {{xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"}}
  {{xsl:output method = "text" /}}
  {{xsl:template match="/"}}
    {{xsl:value-of select="//PMID" /}}
  {{/xsl:template}}
  {{/xsl:stylesheet}}
</cell>

Putting XSL inside double curly brackets works just fine, but now I know a better way: just put it inside a CDATA section!

<map name="LibriVox">
  <XSLT>./XSLT/LibriVox_to_Solr.xsl</XSLT>
  <nextXSL>
  <![CDATA[
  <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
      <xsl:variable name="baseURL" select="'%s'" />
      <xsl:variable name="URL_params" select="'%s'" />
      <xsl:variable name="offset_" select="substring-after($URL_params,'=')" />
      <xsl:variable name="offset" select="substring-before($offset_,'&amp;')" />
      <xsl:variable name="limit_" select="substring-after($URL_params,'&amp;')" />
      <xsl:variable name="limit" select="substring-after($limit_,'=')" />
      <xsl:variable name="output">
        <xsl:value-of select="$baseURL" />
        <xsl:text>?offset=</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="$offset+50" />
        <xsl:text>&amp;limit=</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="50" />
      </xsl:variable>
      <xsl:value-of select="$output" />
    </xsl:template>
  </xsl:stylesheet>
  ]]>
  </nextXSL>
</map>

Duh. I guess like a good XML parser that I always just ignored anything inside a CDATA section. Never thought I'd need to use one.

Putting the XSL inside a CDATA section worked like a charm in terms of being able to read it with a script and perform an XSLT with it.

Luckily, the PubMed2XL script can use either the CDATA way of embedding XSL or my Curly solution – not that I knew that when I wrote it!

It's certainly easier to cut/paste the XSL in the CDATA block without having to replace the brackets with curly quotes or vice versa. It's also just easier to read, which makes it easier to edit and troubleshoot. And it tastes better, too.

Related Content:

• an ID3 tag reporter: MyMusicReporter.py

I usually try to post to this blog once a week on average. That forces me to try to learn something or learn about something during the week that I can post about.

Sometimes though I have to resort to things that I've been sitting on for a while, like this Python script I wrote called MyMusicReporter.

This program makes use of the id3reader module available here. In other words, the program won't function without this module.

For those unfamiliar with Python, it supports the use of modules, which – as the name implies – is basically allowing the current Python program to take advantage of another, pre-existing Python program. At least that's how I understand it for now …

Anyway, MyMusicReporter does the following:

1. it asks you to point it to a root directory on your computer,
2. it then finds all the MP3s in that folder and its subfolders,
3. it makes an XML file in the same directory as MyMusicReporter called MyMusicReport.xml which contains the Title, Performer, Track #, Year, and relative file path for each MP3,
4. it makes an XML stylesheet in the same directory as MyMusicReporter called MyMusicReport.xsl which makes MyMusicReport.xml look pretty in your web browser. 

Here's an example of how the XML looks with my home-grown schema:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="MyMusicReport.xsl"?>
<MyMusicReport>
    <mp3>
        <title>R2-DVD2</title>
        <performer>Nitin Arora</performer>
        <track>1</track>
        <year>2008</year>
        <path>r2_dvd2.mp3</path>
    </mp3>
</MyMusicReport>

Anyway, here's the source code for MyMusicReporter.py.

You assume all responsibility for use.

Related Content:

• layer cake: XML config files with XSL inside CDATA
• AudioRegent 1.3.1 released
• fun with lxml
• on adding an update checker to my Python programs
• South Park Launcher: Python and VB editions