Question

I want to use some kind of XML filtering, using javascript w/ jQuery. I’m not very familiar with xslt yet. I’ve seen that there’s always a XML document and a certain style (XSL) for that document. Then, the result is rendered in XHTML. I really just want to grab some XML, filter (by node name, some attribute, etc) and generate a (filtered/smaller) version of that xml. Do you think the xslt approach is the simplest ?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I really just want to grab some XML, filter (by node name, some
attribute, etc) and generate a (filtered/smaller) version of that xml.
Do you think the xslt approach is the simplest ?

XSLT is a language that has been especially designed for transformation of tree-structured input. This is why it is probably the best and simplest for implementing such tasks.

Here is an example:

<nums>
  <num>01</num>
  <num>02</num>
  <num>03</num>
  <num>04</num>
  <num>05</num>
  <num>06</num>
  <num>07</num>
  <num>08</num>
  <num>09</num>
  <num>10</num>
</nums>

We want to produce from this XML document another document that has the same structure and element name/content, but contains only those num elements from the original document, whose valu is multiple of 3.

Here is the transformation to accomplish this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

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

 <xsl:template match="num[not(. mod 3) = 0]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>