Question

How do I use apply-templates to select only those elements by name (not value) that end with a specific pattern? Assume the following xml…

<report>
  <report_item>
    <report_created_on/>
    <report_cross_ref/>
    <monthly_adj/>
    <quarterly_adj/>
    <ytd_adj/>
  </report_item>
  <report_item>
   ....
  </report_item>
</report>

I want to use <xsl:apply-templates> on all instances of <report_item> where descendant elements end with ‘adj`, so, in this case, only monthly_adj, quaterly_adj, and ytd_adj would be selected and applied with the template.

<xsl:template match="report">
   <xsl:apply-templates select="report_item/(elements ending with 'adj')"/>
</xsl:template>

Answer 1

I don’t think that regular expression syntax is available in this context, even in XSLT 2.0. But you don’t need it in this case.

<xsl:apply-templates select="report_item/*[ends-with(name(), 'adj')]"/>

* matches any node

[pred] performs a node test against the selector (in this case *) (where pred is a predicate evaluated in the context of the selected node)

name() returns the element’s tag name (should be equivalent to local-name for this purpose).

ends-with() is a built-in XPath string function.