XSLT and XPATH: A Guide to XML Transformations

9.3. The <xsl:for-each> Instruction Element

The <xsl:for-each> element provides the ability to recursively process a list of nodes. It is an instruction element that can contain zero or more <xsl:sort> elements (see Section 9.4), followed by a template, as shown in the following element model definition.

<!-- Category: instruction -->

<xsl:for-each

  select = node-set-expression>

  <!-- Content: (xsl:sort*, template) -->

</xsl:for-each>

The value for the required select attribute is a special kind of expression, a node-set-expression, which must always result in a node-set. It is an error to use an expression that returns any other kind of object. The instructions contained in the template will be applied to each node matched by the select attribute. ...