How to transform XML data from child elements to attributes?

[Philip Cooper]

I'm new to XSL and need to know how to transform some XML structured like this:

<table>
    <contents>
        <DATA>Section 1</DATA>
        <DATA>Chapter 1</DATA>
        <DATA>Part 1</DATA>
    </contents>
    <page>
        <DATA>5</DATA>
        <DATA>15</DATA>
        <DATA>24</DATA>
    </page>
    <level>
        <DATA>1</DATA>
        <DATA>2</DATA>
        <DATA>3</DATA>
    </level>
</table>

Into this:

<toc>
    <tocentry level="1" page="5">Section 1</tocentry>
    <tocentry level="2" page="15">Chapter 1</tocentry>
    <tocentry level="3" page="24">Part 1</tocentry>
</toc>

Essentially I want to make the child elements of the 'page' and 'level' elements into attributes of the child elements of the 'contents' element (so as to generate a table of contents for an online text).

[jkmyoung]

Basically, you'll be using the position function.

<xsl:for-each select="//contents/Data">
  <tocentry level="{//level/Data[position()=position(current())]" ....>

I can't remember if this works for all XSLT compilers. You may need to use
<xsl:variable name="pos" select="positio n()"/>
and then have ...Data[position()= $pos]

Also you may have to explicitly declare the attributes depending on compiler.