xslt - Read a remote zipped xml with just XSL

Question

I want to know if it's possible for an XSLT file to read data from an XML located within folders of a remote zip(from the server at work), without any external processors (saxon and so forth) and without downloading it.

Failing that, I'll resort to just reading the information from the zip... which brings me to my other (newb)issue.

I currently have an XSLT that accesses and gets the data from the downloaded and extracted XML file, but I can't do this without extracting it. I've read that with Altova and xslt 2.0 it is possible to read from within a zip file using the document() function, though, as of yet I have not been able achieve this.

this is how I'm trying to do it: document('name.zip|zip/folder/folder2/iwantthis.xml')

It just doesn't seem to find the file. I'd be almost eternally grateful if you show me the error of my ways and guide me into XSLThood.

Thank you kindly

Answer 1

I don't think there is a general way of doing that.

However, in many Java-based XSLT processors (at least Saxon and Xalan), you can use 'jar:' URLs to refer to resources inside zip files. Prefix the URL pointing to the zip file with jar: and suffix it with !/ and the path to the file inside it. Like this: jar:file:///the/path/to/foo.zip!/foo.xml.

To achieve the same in other processors, you would probably need figure out if they allow registering a custom "URI handler" or an equivalent to deal with the special URIs you want to support.