The Sxslt package

Version Sxslt_0.91-1

This package is an R interface to Dan Veillard's libxslt translator. It allows R programmers to use XSLT directly from within R, and also allows XSL code to make use of R functions. In this sense, it is a dual, bi-directional package. It provides a stand-alone XSLT processor that extends xsltproc with support for R functions inside XSL, and it also provides functions within R to parse and apply stylesheets in R. This allows one to use R functions to create content dynamically at the time the document is being created using either XSL or R or both.

We have previously provided the same style of extension for Xalan, the Apache XSL translator. This package currently provides more access to the internal DOM (Document Object Model) of the translator itself.

The advantage of this approach is that it allows one to separate the formatting from the generation of output from statistical software but to have them integrated at the time one creates the document. This allows one to avoid running the statistical software in one window and cutting and pasting the results into a document, or having the statistical software write output to files that are latter included into a larger document.

Possible uses for this package include

Report generation
The XML input acts as a template whose place-holders are expanded when the XSL processing is done using data that is available at that time. Documents such as nightly reports can then be produced with a format specified in the XML file, but with data integrated dynamically.
Reproducible reports (research, simulation, etc.)
The report can be created as self-contained, single object from which we can generate all the contents. This avoids synchronizing figures, tables and results in the document with other files which may be based on different data, etc.

Additionally, these reports can be re-processed with different inputs to generate similarly styled documents, but with different results. This allows what-if analyses to be done relatively easily and consistently with the original document.

...

Download

The current version is available as a GNU-zipped tar file Sxslt_0.91-1.tar.gz

See the README and INSTALL files for instructions on using and installing the package.

  • FAQ
  • S in XSLT
    Some notes and documentation.
  • Changes across the different versions.
  • Examples

    There are currently a few examples

    Related Packages

    RSXMLObjects
    An S package for reading and writing S objects formatted using XML.
    SNetscape
    A plugin for Netscape that allows JavaScript code to call S functions and access S objects as well as allowing S to call JavaScript and communicate with other LiveConnect plugins.
    XML
    An package for reading and writing XML within S.

    Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>
    Last modified: Mon Jun 5 06:21:24 PDT 2006