Applying XSL stylesheet specified in XML file to the XML

[blm]

Hi,

I have an xml file that I get using WWW::Mechanise and it is XML. It starts with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/foo/test.xsl"?>

I want to parse the xml with XML::LibXML, find the xsl file url, retrieve it and apply it. At least that is what I think if have to do. I don't know how to get XML::LibXML to give me the declarations at the top (ie the <? ?> things).

All I really want is the HTML that results from applying the XSL to the XML. (I know, all you really want is a pony but this is about my question at the moment ;-) )

Thanks for any and all help. I am not fixed on using XML::LibXML so I would be interested in any other useful modules.

[dHarry]

You need libxslt for that (in a libxml context). There are alternatives of course, see CPAN. I'm not too familiar with those alternatives. My personal favorite is Xalan.

HTH
dHarry

[blm]

Hi, Thanks for the reply. I realized that I need libxslt. But unless I am missing something I don't see how to pull the xsl uri out of the xml and feed it to libxslt (XML::LibXSLT). (Maybe I just need to grep for it.) That is my problem. Can you show me some code?

Here is my code:

use lib qw|/home/blm/perl/lib|;

use strict;

use WWW::Mechanize;
use XML::LibXML;
use XML::LibXSLT;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new(agent => 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i6
+86; en-US;+ rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1' );

my $url = 'https://some.url.here/';
$mech->delete_header('accept-encoding');
$mech->get($url);

$mech->update_html($mech->content());

print $mech->content;
my $parser = XML::LibXML->new();
my $style_parser = XML::LibXML->new();
my $xslt = XML::LibXSLT->new();

my $doc = $parser->parse_string($mech->content());
print $doc->toString();
my $stylesheet_location = ***Here is my problem***
$mech->get($stylesheet_location);
my $stylesheet_string = $mech->content();
my $styledoc = $style_parser->parse_string($stylesheet_string);
my $stylesheet = $xslt->parse_stylesheet($styledoc);
my $results = $xslt->transform($doc);
print $results;

[dHarry]

Ah, I see. And I have to disappoint you, I use XML::Twig for XML processing in Perl and my own tools for XSLT stuff. I would not grep for it, instead there must be more XML-ish way of doing things. After all it's just a Node of a specific type, i.e. NodeType 'processing-instruction'. So I imagine parsing the file and retrieving the information should do the trick, i.e. walk the DOM tree. Suddenly the grepping doesn't sound so bad anymore;) Another option is to use SAX, I see a processingInstructionSAXFunc in the libxml2 API. However there is another Perl module that might come in handy: XML::LibXML::PI can't you do a getData?

Mind you, in "my" environment it's as simple as one method call: getAssociatedStylesheet()!

[ForgotPasswordAgain]

I don't know how to tell what href is relative to, but even just to get the value of href is a bit gimpy for "processing instructions", which is what <? ... ?> are.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XML::LibXML;

my $parser = XML::LibXML->new;
my $doc = $parser->parse_string(<<'EOX');
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href ='abc"efg'?>
<_/>
EOX

foreach my $node ($doc->findnodes('//processing-instruction()')) {
    my $name = $node->nodeName;

    if ($name eq 'xml-stylesheet') {
        # getData is a string like q{type="text/xsl" href="/test.xsl"}
        # which is what makes it annoying
        my $attr_str = $node->getData;
        # manually parse the string like href='abc"efg';
        # there might be a better way of doing this
        $attr_str =~ m{href\s*=\s*(['"])([^\1]+)\1};

        my $href = defined $2 ? $2 : '';
        print "$name href: >>>$href<<<\n";
    }
}