Marc Liyanage created a useful application called TestXSLT. He also published an XSLT template that helps to make XML output look pretty, that is, to be indented according to the hierarchical structure of the XML file.

I wasn’t happy with the output of the basic <xsl:copy-of select="/data/entry/*"/> instruction. The formatting was looking a little weird. So, I remembered Marc’s work and went about seeing how his handy XML Pretty Printer template might change things.

I created a page with a Parent Page of “Journal” and a URL Parameter of “entry” and ended up with something like this for the template body:

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

<xsl:import href="../utilities/xml-pretty-printer.xsl"/>

<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:for-each select="data/entry">
        <xsl:apply-templates />
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

I made a very minor modification to Marc’s template to output tabs instead of two spaces for indents:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='iso-8859-1'?>

<!-- xml pretty printing xslt -->

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0' xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'>

<xsl:output method='html' version='1.0' encoding='iso-8859-1' indent='no'/>

<xsl:variable name="indent_text" select="'&#x09;'"/>

<xsl:template match="*[count(*) = 0]">
<xsl:param name="indent" select="0"/>
<xsl:call-template name="indent"><xsl:with-param name="count" select="$indent"/></xsl:call-template>
<xsl:element name="{name()}"><xsl:copy-of select="@*"/><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/></xsl:element><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="*[count(*) > 0]">
<xsl:param name="indent" select="0"/>
<xsl:call-template name="indent"><xsl:with-param name="count" select="$indent"/></xsl:call-template>
<xsl:element name="{name()}"><xsl:copy-of select="@*"/><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
<xsl:apply-templates><xsl:with-param name="indent" select="$indent + 1"/></xsl:apply-templates>
<xsl:call-template name="indent"><xsl:with-param name="count" select="$indent"/></xsl:call-template></xsl:element><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="indent">
<xsl:param name="count"/>

<xsl:if test="$count > 0">
<xsl:copy-of select="$indent_text"/>
<xsl:call-template name="indent">
<xsl:with-param name="count" select="$count - 1"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()[string-length(normalize-space(.)) &lt; 1]">
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()[string-length(normalize-space(.)) > 1]">
<xsl:param name="indent" select="0"/>
<xsl:call-template name="indent"><xsl:with-param name="count" select="$indent"/></xsl:call-template>
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The tab character needed to be expressed as a numeric character entity reference: 	. For more information about white space handling in XML and XSLT, Dave Pawson has put together some helpful resources. To view the XML for the current page, I can add some code to the entries template to output a link with the following signature:

{$root}/{$current-page}/xml/{$entry}/

For this to work on the Journal overview, I’ll need to use this instead:

<a href="{$root}/{$current-page}/xml/{title/@handle}/" title="View entry as XML">XML</a>

The unfortunate by-product of using XML Pretty Printer to format the XML is that the code blocks are stripped of all white space, turning them into a single line of code. I’ll have to think of a workaround for this.