Question

I have an xsl that copies a xml file and renames the root tag.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version = '1.0'
     xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform' xmlns:abc="http://example.com">

    <xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="root">
        <test>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
        </test>
    </xsl:template>

    <!--xsl:template match="abc:set">
        -<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>-
    </xsl:template-->

</xsl:stylesheet>

That works fine but when I uncomment the last block to handle some namespaced tags I got an error that the says that something is wrong with the copy statement. How can I match and transform namespaced tags?

Answer 1

You are likely getting an error because the abc:set element has attributes, and your template matching on abc:set is producing “naked” attributes that are not attached to an element.

Since you are not copying the abc:set element (or creating an element) in the template match for abc:set, when the apply-templates inside of that template applies the templates to the selected abc:set/@* and abc:set/node(), then the attributes match the identity template and will be copied forward.

You can verify whether that is the issue by taking the @* out of the select statement for the apply-templates, like this:

<xsl:template match="abc:set">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
</xsl:template>

The template above will only process the child nodes of abc:set.

If your intent was to simply copy the abc:set, then you don’t need a specific template matching on that element. The identity template will match on it and handle that for you.