Question

Could someone help me decrypt this xpath expression?

<xsl:template match="n1:table/@* | 
                     n1:thead/@* | 
                     n1:tfoot/@* | 
                     n1:tbody/@* | 
                     n1:colgroup/@* | 
                     n1:col/@* | 
                     n1:tr/@* | 
                     n1:th/@* | 
                     n1:td/@*">

I believe it’s somewhere around:

Select all attributes from n1:table element AND all attributes from n1:thead element AND all attributes from n1:tfoot … etc.

I’m really not sure though.

Was reading this to get understand the xpath:
http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_syntax.asp

Care to give me a hint?

Thx.

Answer 1

You’ve basically got it right. The | is the XPath’ union set operator:

From http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/#node-sets

The | operator computes the union of
its operands, which must be node-sets

But in patterns, from http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#patterns

In a pattern, | indicates
alternatives; a pattern with one or
more | separated alternatives matches
if any one of the alternative matches.

So the template matches for any attributes of table, thead, tbody, etc in the namespace referenced by n1 relative to the current context node.

You’ll also need to account for the presence of a namespace in your source document using something like the following:

<xsl:stylesheet 
     version="1.0" 
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
     xmlns:n1="uri:something">

More on namespaces in XSLT templates:

http://radio-weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2006/10/03/xslt10PatternMatchingTipsForSourceDocumentsWithNamespaces.html