When I have these two variables
<xsl:variable name="a" select="'Total'" />
<xsl:variable name="b" select="'500'" />
I would like create a node with the name of variable 'a' and its content from variable 'b'. I have to use xsltproc with XSLT 1.0 and a couple of EXSLT extensions (node-set amongst them) so I have kind of achieved part of it:
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:variable name="x" >
<<xsl:value-of select="$a" />>
<xsl:value-of select="$b" />
</<xsl:value-of select="$a" />>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$x" />
</xsl:template>
indeed puts out this (I don't care about whitespace for the moment):
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Total>
500
</Total>
But: I want to use variable 'x' as a node set in order to further manipulate it (of course my real life example is more complex). What I did was transform it into a node-set (using exslt.org/common), that seems to work but accessing the contents does not.
<xsl:variable name="nodes" select="common:node-set($x)" />
<xsl:value-of select="$nodes/Total" />
leads to nothing. I would have expected '500' since $nodes/Total should be a valid XPATH 1.0 expression. Obviously I'm missing something. I guess the point is that the dynamic creation of the node name with <...>
does not really create a node but just some textual output so how can I achieve a true node creation here?
This transformation:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:ext="http://exslt.org/common" exclude-result-prefixes="ext">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:variable name="a" select="'Total'" />
<xsl:variable name="b" select="'500'" />
<xsl:template match="/*">
<xsl:variable name="rtfX">
<xsl:element name="{$a}">
<xsl:value-of select="$b"/>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="ext:node-set($rtfX)/Total"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when applied on any XML document (not used), produces the wanted, correct result:
500