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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T17:59:31+00:00

I am trying to transform XHTML using an XSLT stylesheet, but I can’t even

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I am trying to transform XHTML using an XSLT stylesheet, but I can’t even get a basic stylesheet to match anything. I’m sure I’m missing something simple.

Here’s my XHTML source document (no big surprises):

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content=
"HTML Tidy for Windows (vers 25 March 2009), see www.w3.org" />
...
</body>
</html>

The actual contents don’t matter too much, as I’ll demonstrate below. By the way, I’m pretty sure the document is well-formed since it was created via tidy -asxml.

My more complex XPath expressions were not returning any results, so as a sanity test, I’m trying to transform it very simply using the following stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text>---[</xsl:text>
        <xsl:for-each select="html">
            <xsl:text>Found HTML element.</xsl:text>
        </xsl:for-each>
        <xsl:text>]---</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The transform is done via xsltproc --nonet stylesheet.xsl input.html, and the output is: “—[]—” (i.e., it didn’t find a child element of html). However, if I change the for-each section to:

<xsl:for-each select="*">
    <xsl:value-of select="name()"/>
</xsl:for-each>

Then I get “—[html]—“. And similarly, if I use for-each select="*/*" I get “—[headbody]—” as I would expect.

Why can it find the child element via * (with name() giving the correct name) but it won’t find it using the element name directly?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The html element in your source XML defines a namespace. You have to include it in your match expression and reference it in your xsl:stylesheet element:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <xsl:output method="text" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text>---[</xsl:text>
        <xsl:for-each select="html:html">
            <xsl:text>Found HTML element.</xsl:text>
        </xsl:for-each>
        <xsl:text>]---</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
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