XSLT Quickly - A concise user's guide and tutorial

Geared toward new users of XSLT, this guide is a basic tutorial of the concepts and documentation manipulation techniques necessary for the most common XSLT tasks. Featuring an XSLT cookbook, which provides task-oriented recipes for tackling issues such as converting elements to attributes or reading in multiple documents at once, this guide makes it easier to find solutions to most development problems. Included are a glossary, a reference for XSLT syntax, and a reference for using the popular XSLT processors. This guide will help XSLT users get common transformations done with minimal time and effort.

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
	About this book	xi
	Acknowledgments	xiv
	About the cover illustration	xv
Part 1	Getting started with XSLT	1
1	A brief tutorial	3
1.1	What is XSLT (and XSL, and XPath)?	3
	XSLT and alternatives	5
	Documents, trees, and transformations	6
1.2	A simple XSLT stylesheet	8
	Template rules	9
	Running an XSLT processor	11
	An empty stylesheet	12
1.3	More element and attribute manipulation	13
	Manipulating attributes	14
	Attribute value templates	15
1.4	Summing up the tutorial	16
Part 2	XSLT user's guide: How do I work with...	21
2	XPath	23
2.1	Location paths, axes, node tests, and predicates	24
2.2	Axes	24
	The child, parent, and attribute axes	25
	Ancestor and ancestor-or-self	27
	Preceding-sibling and following-sibling	29
	Preceding and following	32
	Descendant and descendant-or-self	35
	Self	39
	Namespace	40
2.3	Node tests	41
2.4	Predicates	43
3	Elements and attributes	47
3.1	Adding new elements to the result tree	47
3.2	Changing element names for the result tree	50
3.3	Parent, grandparent, sibling, uncle, and other relative elements: getting their content and attributes	50
3.4	Previous, next, first, third, last siblings	53
3.5	Converting elements to attributes for the result tree	55
3.6	Copying elements to the result tree	57
3.7	Counting elements and other nodes	61
3.8	Deleting elements from the result tree	63
3.9	Duplicate elements, deleting	64
3.10	Empty elements: creating, checking for	67
3.11	Moving and combining elements for the result tree	69
	Reordering an element's children with xsl:apply-templates	69
	Moving text with xsl:value-of	71
3.12	Selecting elements based on: element name, content, children, parents	72
3.13	Adding new attributes	77
3.14	Converting attributes to elements	79
3.15	Getting attribute values and names	80
3.16	Testing for attribute existence and for specific attribute values	81
3.17	Reusing groups of attributes	82
4	Advanced XML markup	84
4.1	Comments	84
	Outputting comments	84
	Reading and using source tree comments	86
4.2	Entities	87
4.3	Namespaces	91
	Namespaces and your result document	94
	Namespaces and stylesheet logic	98
4.4	Images, multimedia elements, and other unparsed entities	104
4.5	Processing instructions	106
	Outputting processing instructions	106
	Reading and using source tree processing instructions	108
5	Programming issues	110
5.1	Control statements	110
	Conditional statements with "If" and "Choose" (case) statements	110
	Curly braces: when do I need them?	115
	"For" loops, iteration	118
5.2	Combining stylesheets with include and import	126
	xsl:include	126
	xsl:import	128
5.3	Named templates	132
5.4	Debugging	133
	Runtime messages, aborting processor execution	134
	Keeping track of your elements	137
	Tracing a processor's steps	140
	Listing the nodes in an XPath expression	142
5.5	Extensions to XSLT	143
	Extension elements	143
	Using built-in extension functions	146
5.6	Numbers and math	149
5.7	Strings	153
	Extracting and comparing strings	153
	Search and replace	160
5.8	Variables and parameters: setting and using	164
	Variables	164
	Parameters	169
5.9	Declaring keys and performing lookups	173
5.10	Finding the first, last, biggest, and smallest	178
5.11	Using the W3C XSLT specification	182
	Pairs of confusing related terms	183
	Other confusing terms	185
6	Specialized input & output	187
6.1	HTML and XSLT	187
	HTML as input	188
	HTML as output	190
6.2	Browsers and XSLT	192
	Internet Explorer	194
	Netscape Navigator	194
6.3	Multiple input documents	195
6.4	Using modes to create tables of contents and other generated lists	199
6.5	Non-XML output	202
6.6	Numbering, automatic	205
6.7	Sorting	215
6.8	Stripping all markup from a document	224
6.9	Valid XML output: including DOCTYPE declarations	225
6.10	XML declarations	228
6.11	Whitespace: preserving and controlling	229
	xsl:strip-space and xsl:preserve-space	230
	Indenting	233
	Adding and removing whitespace with xsl:text	236
	Adding tabs to your output	239
	Normalizing space	241
6.12	Generating IDs and links	243
6.13	XSL and XSLT: creating Acrobat files and other formatted output	247
6.14	Splitting up output into multiple files	253
Part 3	Appendices	257
A	XSLT quick reference	259
A.1	Top-level elements	260
A.2	Instructions	263
A.3	No category	266
B	Running XSLT processors	269
B.1	Running XSLT processors	269
B.2	Saxon	273
B.3	XT	274
B.4	iXSLT	275
B.5	Xalan-Java	276
B.6	Xalan-C++	277
B.7	Sablotron	278
B.8	MSXSL	279
	Glossary	281
	Index	287