XSLT, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Combining Documents

One of XSLT’s most powerful features is the document() function, which lets you combine documents. You can use parts of a document (specified with XPath expressions, of course) to identify other documents. You can then open those documents and perform stylesheet functions on the combination of those documents. In this chapter, we’ll cover the document() function in all its glory.

[2.0] XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 provide three new functions for combining documents: doc(), collection(), and unparsed-text(). The doc() function, defined by XPath 2.0, is similar to the document() function, though less powerful. The collection() function, also defined by XPath 2.0, allows us to add collections of nodes provided by an XSLT processor. The kinds of nodes provided can vary from one processor to the next. Finally, the unparsed-text() function lets us add raw text to the data we’re processing in our stylesheet. When combined with features such as tokenization and regular expressions, unparsed-text() gives us many new ways of manipulating data. We’ll look at these new functions at the end of this chapter.