XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Wildcards

Wildcards match different element and node types at the same time. There are three wildcards: *, node( ) , and @*.

The asterisk (*) matches any element node regardless of name. For example, this XSLT template rule says that all elements should have their child elements processed but should not result in any output in and of themselves:

<xsl:template match="*"><xsl:apply-templates select="*"/></xsl:template>

The * does not match attributes, text nodes, comments, or processing-instruction nodes. Thus, in the previous example, output will only come from child elements that have their own template rules that override this one.

You can put a namespace prefix in front of the asterisk. In this case, only elements in the same namespace are matched. For example, svg:* matches all elements with the same namespace URI as the svg prefix is mapped to. As usual, it’s the URI that matters, not the prefix. The prefix can be different in the stylesheet and the source document as long as the namespace URI is the same.

The node( ) wildcard matches not only all element types but also the root node, text nodes, processing-instruction nodes, namespace nodes, attribute nodes, and comment nodes.

The @* wildcard matches all attribute nodes. For example, this XSLT template rule copies the values of all attributes of a person element in the document into the content of an attributes element in the output:

<xsl:template match="person"> <attributes><xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/></attributes> </xsl:template> ...