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XSLT Tutorial

With XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) you can transform a xml file into any desired output. You can generate html, text or even sourcecode.

I wrote a small tutorial to show you how it works.

The following diagramm shows you how the XSLT-process works:

image

Let’s start with a simple example. We’ll try to generate some html code to make the xml-data more readable. I run Saxon 9 HE as processor.

The XML input:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<users>
    <user>
        <name>Patrick</name>
        <image>patrick.png</image>
    </user>
    <user>
        <name>Paul</name>
        <image>paul.png</image>
    </user>
</users>

The XSLT stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" encoding="UTF-8"/>
    <xsl:template match="/users">
        <html>
            <head>
                <title>XSLT Tutorial</title>
            </head>
            <body>
                <xsl:apply-templates select="user" />
            </body>
        </html>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="user">
        <img>
            <xsl:attribute name="src">
                <xsl:value-of select="image" />
            </xsl:attribute>
        </img>
        <xsl:value-of select="name" />
        <br />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The output:

image

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<html>
   <head>
      <title>XSLT Tutorial</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <img src="patrick.png"/>Patrick<br/>
      <img src="paul.png"/>Paul<br/>
   </body>
</html>

XSLT is very powerfull, check out all the tags at w3schools.