Possible XML Question

set_uk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This may be better asked on an XML site - but I am doing the manipulation in Perl so I'll check here.

Using XML::Generator::DBI to create XML which is then transformed using XML::LibXSLT.

I am converting to CSV and I have a number of row entries where some column values are NULL and I still want to output commas.

The XSLT appears to ignore the nodes as I assume being NULL they aren't in the nodeset. Anyone had this issue with converting?

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Re: Possible XML Question by grantm (Parson) on Apr 08, 2003 at 23:10 UTC
Database to XML through XSLT to CSV sounds like a very roundabout way to achieve your ends. If your database does not support exporting directly to a CSV, then you could open one DBI connection to execute your query and open a second one to a file using DBD::CSV then loop through the result set doing inserts on the second connection.	[reply]
Re: Re: Possible XML Question by set_uk (Pilgrim) on Apr 09, 2003 at 12:02 UTC
Its not as bad as it sounds - I am trying to achieve one select executed against the DB and then once I have the result set in XML I want to XSLT that to HTML or CSV depending on the situation. This way it minimises the database activity.	[reply]
Re: Possible XML Question by CountZero (Bishop) on Apr 08, 2003 at 21:32 UTC
If you happen to use mySQL, you can directly output a CSV-file from this database. See 6.4.1 SELECT Syntax on the mySQL-docs: The SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE 'file_name' form of SELECT writes the selected rows to a file. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: Possible XML Question by dakkar (Hermit) on Apr 09, 2003 at 16:00 UTC
As you have discovered, the nodes are not in the document, to distinguish between NULL and empty string. As for XSLT, you could always do: `<xsl:template match="row"> <xsl:value-of select="column1"/>,<xsl:value-of select="column2"/>,<!- +- etc etc --> </xsl:template>` [download] In this way, non-existant elements will get stringified into the empty string. -- dakkar - Mobilis in mobile Most of my code is tested... Perl is strongly typed, it just has very few types (Dan)	[reply] [d/l]

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