XSLT, 2nd Edition

Selecting Things Besides Elements with Location Paths

Up until now, we’ve discussed XPath expressions that used either element names (/sonnet/lines/line) or special characters (/ or ..) to select elements from an XML document. Obviously, XML documents contain things other than elements; we’ll talk about how to select those other things here.

Selecting attributes

To select an attribute, use the at-sign (@) along with the attribute name. In our sample sonnet, you can select the type attribute of the <sonnet> element with the XPath expression /sonnet/@type. If the context node is the <sonnet> element itself, then the relative XPath expression @type does the same thing.

Selecting the text of an element

To select the text of an element, simply refer to it in your expression. The element <xsl:value-of select="/sonnet/auth:author/last-name"/> returns Shakespeare for our sample sonnet. You can also use the string() function, although that’s typically not necessary.

These XSLT instructions:

<xsl:value-of select="/sonnet/something_else:author/first-name"/>
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="/sonnet/something_else:author/last-name/string()"/>

generate these results:

William Shakespeare

Be aware that getting the text of an element with children probably doesn’t do what you want. For example, the element <xsl:value-of select="/sonnet/auth:author"/> returns the string ShakespeareWilliamBritish15641616. All of the text descendants of the <auth:author> node are concatenated together. To format ...