Converting bespoke formatting into html formatting using XSLT - xslt

Question

I have some data where formatting commands have been created in the format
^B Makes the rest of the line bold
^I Makes the rest of the line italic
etc., and I'm trying to turn this in to html <b>, <i> etc.
These codes can be combined and occur anywhere in the line, but apply to the rest of the line only.
I've tokenised the data into lines, and am using analyze-string on each line to pick up the formmatting marks. The problem is that I need to open the formatting instruction where I find it in the string, but then close it at the end of the string, and what I have doesn't work, as it opens and closes the format where the marker is, as you would expect:
<xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="\^([BIU])">
<xsl:matching-substring>
<xsl:element name="{lower-case(regex-group(1))}"/>
</xsl:matching-substring>
<xsl:non-matching-substring>
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:non-matching-substring>
</xsl:analyze-string>
What I get from this is:
<b></b> Makes the rest of the line bold
<i></i> Makes the rest of the line italic
where what I want is obviously
<b> Makes the rest of the line bold </b>
<i> Makes the rest of the line italic </i>
I can't see an obvous way of using analyze-string to achieve this, and the only way I can see of doing it is to use a recursive function to process do substring-afters etc., which seems rather messy.
Anyone with a better idea? Thanks!
Screwtape.

Answer 1

You just need add another pattern to your regex expression to capture the rest of the line after the symbol, which can then be output inside your newly created element
Try this
<xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="\^([BIU])(.*)">
<xsl:matching-substring>
<xsl:element name="{lower-case(regex-group(1))}">
<xsl:value-of select="regex-group(2)" />
</xsl:element>
</xsl:matching-substring>
<xsl:non-matching-substring>
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:non-matching-substring>
</xsl:analyze-string>