XSLT

XSLT stands for Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations.

Links

• https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
• http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/

Extensions

From w3.org [1]:

• The element extension mechanism allows namespaces to be designated as extension namespaces. When a namespace is designated as an extension namespace and an element with a name from that namespace occurs in a template, then the element is treated as an instruction rather than as a literal result element.

Extensions available in the XSLT processor

Using xsltproc (package xsltproc [2], we can get the list of built-in extensions with:

xsltproc --dumpextensions 
# Registered XSLT Extensions
# --------------------------
# Registered Extension Functions:
# {http://exslt.org/math}atan2
# {http://exslt.org/strings}align
# ...

exslt.org/crypto

• "Hidden" extensions that provides basic crypto functions (apparently from patch [3], introduced in July 5 2004 [4]):

xsltproc --dumpextensions|grep crypto
# {http://exslt.org/crypto}rc4_decrypt
# {http://exslt.org/crypto}md4
# {http://exslt.org/crypto}sha1
# {http://exslt.org/crypto}md5
# {http://exslt.org/crypto}rc4_encrypt

Quick reference

xsl:attribute

Input	Output
<link site="www.stackoverflow.com"/>	<a href="http://www.stackoverflow.com">Click here</a>

Use

<xsl:template match="link">
    <a>
        <xsl:attribute name="href">
            <xsl:text>http://</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="@site"/>
        </xsl:attribute>
        <xsl:text>Link</xsl:text>
    </a>
</xsl:template>

Or shorter using curly braces {...} [5]:

<xsl:template match="link">
    <a href="http://{@site}">Click here</a>
</xsl:template>

Also for:

• Using variables (like in <a href="http://{$varName}">Click here</a>)