XSLT Cookbook

Exporting XML to Delimited Data

Problem

You need to convert some XML into data suitable for importing into another application such as a spreadsheet.

Solution

Many applications import delimited data. The most common format is called Comma Separated Values (CSV). Many spreadsheets and databases can handle CSV and other forms of delimited data. Mapping XML to delimited data can be simple or complex, depending on the difficulty of the mapping. This section starts with simple cases and progresses toward more complicated scenarios.

Create a CSV file from flat attribute-encoded elements

In this scenario, you have a flat XML file with elements mapping to rows and attributes mapping to columns.

This problem is trivial for any given XML file of the appropriate format. For example, the following stylesheet shown in Example 5-6 through Example 5-8 outputs a CSV based on the input people.xml.

Example 5-6. people.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <people> <person name="Al Zehtooney" age="33" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Brad York" age="38" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Charles Xavier" age="32" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="David Willimas" age="33" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Edward Ulster" age="33" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> <person name="Frank Townsend" age="35" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Greg Sutter" age="40" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="Harry Rogers" age="37" sex="m" smoker="no"/> <person name="John Quincy" age="43" sex="m" smoker="yes"/> ...