Question

I have several templates that match various nodes in an xml document. If I do just an
<xsl:apply-templates/> it somehow recursively outputs the text of all the nodes beneath. I just want it to recursively match any template I have defined. How do I do that ?

Answer 1

This is happening because of the built-in templates in XSLT. XSLT has a couple of built in templates, which say:

• when you apply templates to an element, process its child elements
• when you apply templates to a text node, give its value

Together, it means that if you apply templates to an element but don’t have an explicit template for that element, then its content gets processed and eventually you end up with the text that the element contains.

Read the full explanation here: http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/defaultrule.html

You can override the default templates for text nodes by defining your own template and have it do nothing.

<xsl:template match='text()' />