Saxon Documentation

Full Contents

About Saxon

Changes in this Release

Licensing

Using XSLT 2.0

Using XQuery

Handling Source Documents

XML Schema Processing

XPath API for Java

Saxon on .NET

Extensibility

Saxon Extensions

Sample Saxon Applications

The Saxon SQL Extension

XSLT Elements
	Introduction
	xsl:analyze-string
	xsl:apply-imports
	xsl:apply-templates
	xsl:attribute
	xsl:attribute-set
	xsl:call-template
	xsl:character-map
	xsl:choose
	xsl:comment
	xsl:copy
	xsl:copy-of
	xsl:decimal-format
	xsl:document
	xsl:element
	xsl:fallback
	xsl:for-each
	xsl:for-each-group
	xsl:function
	xsl:if
	xsl:include
	xsl:import
	xsl:import-schema
	xsl:key
	xsl:matching-substring
	xsl:message
	xsl:namespace
	xsl:namespace-alias
	xsl:next-match
	xsl:non-matching-substring
	xsl:number
	xsl:otherwise
	xsl:output
	xsl:output-character
	xsl:param
	xsl:perform-sort
	xsl:preserve-space
	xsl:processing-instruction
	xsl:result-document
	xsl:sequence
	xsl:sort
	xsl:strip-space
	xsl:stylesheet
	xsl:template
	xsl:text
	xsl:value-of
	xsl:variable
	xsl:when
	xsl:with-param
	Literal Result Elements
»	XSLT Patterns

XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax

Function Library

Standards Conformance

Examples of Patterns

The table below gives some examples of patterns, and explains their meaning:

Pattern	Meaning
PARA	Matches any element whose name (tag) is PARA
*	Matches any element
APPENDIX/PARA	Matches any PARA element whose parent is an APPENDIX
APPENDIX//PARA	Matches any PARA element that has an ancestor named APPENDIX
/*/SECTION	Matches any SECTION element that is an immediate child of the outermost element in the document
*[@NAME]	Matches any element with a NAME attribute
SECTION/PARA[1]	Matches any PARA element that is the first PARA child of a SECTION element
SECTION[TITLE="Contents"]	Matches any SECTION element whose first TITLE child element has the value "Contents"
A/TITLE \| B/TITLE \| C/TITLE	Matches any TITLE element whose parent is of type A or B or C (Note that this cannot be written "(A\|B\|C)/TITLE", although that is a valid XPath 2.0 path expression.)
/BOOK//*	Matches any element in a document provided the top-level element in the document is named "BOOK"
A/text()	Matches the character content of an A element
A/@*	Matches any attribute of an A element

In a schema-aware stylesheet, it can be useful to match elements by their schema-defined type, rather than by their name. The following table shows some examples of this.

Pattern	Meaning
schema-element(CHAPTER)	Matches any element that has been validated against the global element declaration named CHAPTER. More precisely, it matches an element named CHAPTER that has been validated against the type of the global element declaration named CHAPTER, and any element in the substitution group of the CHAPTER element.
element(*, ADDRESS-TYPE)	Matches any element that has been validated against the schema-defined global type definition ADDRESS-TYPE. The "*" indicates that there are no constraints on the element's name.
attribute(*, xs:date)	Matches any attribute that has been validated as an instance of xs:date, including types derived by restriction from xs:date.