XSLT Cookbook

Converting Elements to Attributes

Problem

You have a document that encodes information using child elements, and you would like to use attributes instead.

Solution

As with Recipe 6.1, you can use the overriding copy idiom. However, when transforming elements to attributes, you must selectively determine where the transformation will be applied. This is because the idea of transforming all elements to attributes is nonsensical. The following stylesheet reverses the attribute-to-element transformation we performed in Recipe 6.1:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   
<xsl:import href="copy.xslt"/>
   
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"/>
   
<xsl:template match="person">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:for-each select="*">
      <xsl:attribute name="{local-name(.)}">
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
      </xsl:attribute>  
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
   
</xsl:stylesheet>

Discussion

Converting from elements to attributes is not always as straightforward as transforming in the opposite direction. If the elements being converted to attributes have attributes themselves, you must decide what will become of them. In the preceding solution, they would be lost. Another alternative would be to promote them to the new parent:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:import href="copy.xslt"/> <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"/> <xsl:template match="person"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:for-each select="*"> <xsl:attribute ...