XSLT, 2nd Edition

The <xsl:for-each> Element

If you want to process all the nodes that match a certain criteria, you can use the <xsl:for-each> element. Be aware that this isn’t a traditional for loop; you can’t ask the XSLT processor to do something like this:

for i = 1 to 10 do

The <xsl:for-each> element lets you select a set of nodes, and then do something with each of them. Let me mention again that this is not the same as a traditional for loop. Another important point is that the current node changes with each iteration through the <xsl:for-each> element. We’ll go through some examples to illustrate this.

Note

You can use the XSLT 2.0 to operator to do something similar (select="1 to 10"). When you’re working with XSLT, it’s better to think of <xsl:for-each> as an iterator rather than a traditional for loop.

<xsl:for-each> example

Here’s a sample that selects all <section> elements inside a <tutorial> element and then uses a second <xsl:for-each> element to select all the <panel> elements inside each <section> element:

<xsl:template match="tutorial">
  <xsl:for-each select="section">
    <h1>
      <xsl:text>Section </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="position()"/>
      <xsl:text>. </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
    </h1>
    <ul>
      <xsl:for-each select="panel">
        <li>
          <xsl:value-of select="position()"/>
          <xsl:text>. </xsl:text>
          <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
        </li>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </ul>
  </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

Given this XML document:

<tutorial> <section> <title>Gene Splicing for Young People</title> <panel> <title>Introduction</title> ...