XSLT, 2nd Edition

Using Wildcards

XPath features three wildcards:

The asterisk (*)

Selects all element nodes in the current context. Be aware that the asterisk wildcard selects element nodes only; attributes, text nodes, comments, or processing instructions aren’t included. You can also use a namespace prefix with an asterisk. In our sample sonnet, the XPath expression auth:* returns all element nodes in the current context that are associated with the namespace URL http://www.authors.com/.

[2.0] XPath 2.0 lets us use a wildcard as a namespace prefix. The XPath expression *:author returns all element nodes in the current context that have a local name of author, regardless of their namespace. In XPath 2.0, both auth:* and *:author are legal; in XPath 1.0, looking for *:author causes a fatal error.

Note

As always, searching for a matching namespace is based on the namespace URL, not the prefix. For example, assume the namespace URL http://www.authors.com/ is associated with the prefix auth in the XML document and the prefix something_else in our stylesheet. Looking for something_else:* in the stylesheet returns all of the elements with the auth prefix in the XML document.

The at-sign and asterisk (@*)

Selects all attribute nodes in the current context. You can use a namespace prefix with the attribute wildcard. In our sample sonnet, @auth:* returns all attribute nodes in the current context that are associated with the namespace URL http://www.authors.com. (There aren’t any attributes associated with the ...