TIL: In an xml style sheet, an xslt file, testing for the existence of an attribute is not the same as testing whether an attribute has content.
I have a machine readable file (OPML) with lines such as
<outline type="book" text="title by author" name="book title" author="author name" url="" comment="some remarks" authorurl="" inLanguage="en" />
I want to show that file in a browser for people to see, and I want to test for the attribute url in that line so that I can mark up the text with a web link in the human readable version.
What I first used to test for the presence of a link was:
<xsl:when test="@url">
I assumed this would test for the actual presence of a value for attribute ‘url’. But that is not correct. The statement actually tests whether the attribute ‘url’ is present in the line of machine readable code.
To test if the url attribute also has content in it, e.g. url=”https://weblink.tld/page” and not url=”” I need to check that the field is not empty:
<xsl:when test="@url!=''">
I experimentally create OPML lists of books I read (see why and how). For instance I have a ‘fiction 2021’ list. OPML files are meant to be read by machines, but I use the same file to make a human readable version. In the human readable version I want to link to a book and to an author if I have a direct link to a page about the book (by the publisher or author) and a link to the author’s website. I test for non-empty url attributes so I know when to construct a link in the human readable output. You can download the XSLT I use to do that and of course the OPML file that lists the fiction books for 2021 (also see right hand side column, in the feeds section).