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XML XSLT Introduction

  • XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language used for transforming structured data into other formats, such as HTML, XML, and text.
  • It is an XML-based language and is used for performing transformations of XML documents.

Syntax

The basic syntax for an XSLT stylesheet is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="/">
    ...
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
  • The xsl:stylesheet element is the root element of an XSLT stylesheet.
  • The xmlns:xsl attribute defines the namespace for XSLT.
  • The version attribute specifies the version of XSLT being used.
  • The xsl:template element is used to match nodes in the input document.

Example

Suppose we have an XML document, books.xml, containing information about books as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<books>
  <book>
    <title>Alice in Wonderland</title>
    <author>Lewis Carroll</author>
    <year>1865</year>
  </book>
  <book>
    <title>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</title>
    <author>Mark Twain</author>
    <year>1876</year>
  </book>
</books>

We want to transform this data into an HTML table. An XSLT stylesheet to achieve this could look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <html>
      <body>
        <table>
          <tr>
            <th>Title</th>
            <th>Author</th>
            <th>Year</th>
          </tr>
          <xsl:for-each select="books/book">
            <tr>
              <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>
              <td><xsl:value-of select="author"/></td>
              <td><xsl:value-of select="year"/></td>
            </tr>
          </xsl:for-each>
        </table>
      </body>
    </html>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Here, we have used the xsl:for-each element to loop through each book element in the input document and generate an HTML table row for each.

Output

When this XSLT stylesheet is applied to the books.xml document, we get an output like:

<html>
   <body>
      <table>
         <tr>
            <th>Title</th>
            <th>Author</th>
            <th>Year</th>
         </tr>
         <tr>
            <td>Alice in Wonderland</td>
            <td>Lewis Carroll</td>
            <td>1865</td>
         </tr>
         <tr>
            <td>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</td>
            <td>Mark Twain</td>
            <td>1876</td>
         </tr>
      </table>
   </body>
</html>

Explanation

In the stylesheet, we define a template with the match attribute set to /, which selects the root node of the input document. We then use XSLT elements to construct an HTML document.

We use the xsl:for-each element to loop through each book element in the input document and generate an HTML table row for each. Inside the xsl:for-each loop, we use the xsl:value-of element to output the content of the title, author, and year elements.

Use

XSLT can be used in a variety of scenarios, such as:

  • Converting XML to HTML or another text-based format.
  • Extracting specific data from an XML document.
  • Filtering and restructuring XML content.
  • Creating charts and diagrams from XML data.

Important Points

  • XSLT is a language used for transforming structured data into other formats.
  • It is an XML-based language and is used for performing transformations of XML documents.
  • The basic syntax for an XSLT stylesheet consists of an xsl:stylesheet element that defines the root element, a namespace declaration for XSLT, a version attribute, and an xsl:template element that contains the transformation logic.
  • An XSLT stylesheet can be used to generate HTML, XML, or text-based output.
  • XSLT can be used in a variety of scenarios, such as data extraction, filtering, and restructuring.

Summary

In this tutorial, we have introduced XSLT, a language used for transforming structured data into other formats, such as HTML, XML, and text. We have covered the basic syntax for XSLT stylesheets, an example transformation of XML data into an HTML table, the output generated by the stylesheet, its explanation, use cases, important points, and summary.

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