Question

I have some XML/TEI documents, and i’m writing an XSLT 2.0 to extract their content.

Almost all TEI documents has no namespace, but one has the default namespace (xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0").
So all documents has the same aspect, with unqulified tags like <TEI> or <teiHeader>, but if I try to extract the content, all works with “non-namespaced-documents”, but nothing (of course) is extracted from the namespaced-document.

So i used the attribute xpath-default-namespace="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" and now (of course) the only document working is the namespaced one.

I can’t edit documents at all, so what I’m asking is if there’s a way to change dynamically the xpath-default-namespace in order to make work xpaths like //teiHeader both with namespaced and non-namespaced documents

Answer 1

If you are using XSLT 2.0, then you do have the option for a wildcard match for the namespace in a node test.

e.g. //*:teiHeader

http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath20/#node-tests

A node test can also have the form
*:NCName. In this case, the node test is true for any node of the principal
node kind of the step axis whose local
name matches the given NCName,
regardless of its namespace or lack of
a namespace.

This is functionally equivalent to Dimitre Novatchev’s example, but a little shorter/easier to type.

However, this will only work in XSLT/XPATH 2.0.