Examples of XSLT 2.0 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.