Question

Is it possible to sort XML files like the following:

<model name="ford">
<driver>Bob</driver>
<driver>Alice</driver>
</model>

<model name="audi">
<driver>Carly</driver>
<driver>Dean</driver>
</model>

Which would become

<model name="audi">
<driver>Carly</driver>
<driver>Dean</driver>
</model>

<model name="ford">
<driver>Alice</driver>
<driver>Bob</driver>
</model>

That is, the outermost elements are sorted first, then the second outermost, and so on.

They’d need to be sorted by element name first.

Answer 1

This is a refinement of Kirill’s solution, I think it better reflects the stated requirements, and it avoids the type error XSLT 2.0 will give you if the sort key contains more than one value (but it still works on 1.0).

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

  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="*">
      <xsl:sort select="(@name | text())[1]"/>
    </xsl:apply-templates>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>