Can an xsl:function return an element w/value?

[grego122]

Just starting to get heavy into xslt. I'm particularly interested in xslt 2.0 and the use of regular expressions, etc.
I'm trying to figure out how I can return an element from a function. My non-xml data is very unstructured (more than I will show here) but I'm trying to see
if I can transform it into xml by putting an xml tag around it. My example data looks as follow:

<data>
pet:dog*name:tiger*
store:target*day:
wednesday*
</data>

My goal is to have the following output:
<pet>dog</pet>
<name>tiger</name>
<day>wednesday</day>
...

There many way I can parse this but, for now, I'm trying to see if I can have a function return
an element with data, such as: <pet>dog<pet>. I'm having problem putting the data
in a xsl:value-of select statement; though I'm escaping the xml angle brackets. My function looks
like the following:

<xsl:function name="my:normalizedData" as="xs:anyAtomicType*">
<xsl:param name="input"/>
<xsl:variable name="out" as="xs:anyAtomicType*">

<!-- the following express should produce: pet:doj
with regexp-group(1)=pet, gegexp-group(2)=dog -->
<xsl:analyze-string select="$input" regex="(.*?):(.*?)(?=\*)">

<xsl:matching-substring>
<xsl:value-of select="
\<regexp-group(1)\>regexp-group(2)\</regexp-group(2)\>"/>
</xsl:matching-substring>
</xsl:analyze-string>
</xsl:function>

Thank you,

[dorinbogdan]

Hi,
Did you succeed to solve the problem ?
If yes, please let me know, in order to close the thread.
Thanks,
Dorin.