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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T13:10:13+00:00

i want to transform some xml into HTML that has the following format: <TR><TD>

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i want to transform some xml into HTML that has the following format:

<TR><TD> col1 <TD> col2 <TD> col3 </TR>

Note: The output is HTML, complete with optional closing tags omitted. This is the problem, and the reason the question exists.

A snippet of the XSL i’m using is:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output 
    doctype-system='http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd'
    doctype-public='-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN'
    indent='yes'
    method='html'
    />
   ...
   <xsl:for-each select="/">  
      <TR><TD><xsl:value-of select="col1"/><TD><xsl:value-of select="col2"/><TD><xsl:value-of select="col3"/></TR>
   </xsl:for-each>

You can see that the guts of the XSL matches my desired HTML (wrapped for easy reading):

<TR>  <TD><xsl:value-of select="Column1"/>
      <TD><xsl:value-of select="Column2"/>
      <TD><xsl:value-of select="Column3"/> </TR>

Note: Those of you who know the error i’m getting from the XSLT: hopefully already know the answer.

When presented with my XSL (which, don’t forget, is a form of xml), i get the non-well formed error:

End tag ‘TR’ does not match the start tag ‘TD’.

This makes perfect sense. Indeed:

<TD><xsl:value-of select="Column3"/> </TR>

i do not close the TD element before closing the TR. So the question is:

How can i transform xml into HTML, given that HTML is not xml?

See also

Update one

It has been suggested that one could simply include the closing tags anyway, in order to make the XSL validate (shown wrapped for easy reading):

<TR>    <TD><xsl:value-of select="col1"/></TD>
        <TD><xsl:value-of select="col2"/></TD>
        <TD><xsl:value-of select="col3"/></TD>   </TR>

then, by using xsl:output method='html', the final HTML content would have the </TD> tags magically omitted. Except it doesn’t work:

<TR><TD>col1</TD><TD>col2</TD><TD>col3</TD></TR>

Update two

It has been suggested that i give up, don’t bother asking this question, and just include the optional closing tags. That’s possible, but that’s not my question. Also, the “solution” doesn’t work for elements where the closing tag is forbidden, e.g.:

<BR/>

or 

<BR></BR>

How would i include a <BR> element in my HTML output, given that it is forbidden in HTML to close a <BR> element.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Here’s one way to do this:

    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output method="text"/>

 <xsl:template match="/*">
   &lt;TR>&lt;TD><xsl:value-of select="col1"/>&lt;TD><xsl:value-of select="col2"/>&lt;TD><xsl:value-of select="col3"/>&lt;/TR>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

    When this transformation is applied on the following XML document:

    <t>
 <col1>1</col1>
 <col2>2</col2>
 <col3>3</col3>
</t>

    the wanted result is correctly produced:

       <TR><TD>1<TD>2<TD>3</TR>
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