How do I iterate over an xs:list? - xslt

Question

Consider the schema:
<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:element name="TheList">
<xs:simpleType>
<xs:list itemType="xs:string" />
</xs:simpleType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>
And the xml:
<TheList>
This list has 5 values.
</TheList>
How can I iterate over each of the words in the list? To create something like:
<item>This</item>
<item>list</item>
<item>has</item>
<item>5</item>
<item>values.</item>
Based on the answers I've found here and here, I should do something like:
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="TheList">
<xsl:for-each select="tokenize(., ' ')">
<item><xsl:value-of select="." /></item>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
However, at least in Altova's XML spy, I am getting this error:
Wrong occurrence to match required sequence type: The supplied sequence ('5' item(s)) has the wrong occurrence to match the sequence type xs:string ('zero or one')
Using the built in debugger, I have been able to determine that the error is thrown when calling tokenize on an element that has been declared as an xs:list. Which makes sense, since the element should already be split according to the rules regarding xs:list. To me, this suggests:
<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="TheList">
<xsl:for-each select=".">
<item><xsl:value-of select="." /></item>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
However, this treats the list as a single item and does not create a new item element for each word.
The for-each command seems to treat the xs:list as a single element while the tokenize function seems to treat the same xs:list as multiple elements. What am I missing?

Answer 1

If you're using a schema-aware transformation, then you don't need to tokenize the value yourself - the process of atomization does it for you automatically.
<xsl:template match="TheList">
<xsl:for-each select="data(.)">
<item><xsl:value-of select="." /></item>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
If you want the code to work in both schema-aware and non-schema-aware environments you can write
<xsl:template match="TheList">
<xsl:for-each select="tokenize(string(.), ' ')">
<item><xsl:value-of select="." /></item>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>