XSLT Cookbook

Renaming Elements or Attributes

Problem

You need to rename or re-namespace elements or attributes in an XML document.

Solution

If you need to rename a small number of attributes or elements, use a straightforward version of the overriding copy idiom, as shown in Example 6-5.

Example 6-5. Rename person to individual

<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">
  <individual>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </individual>
</xsl:template>
   
</xsl:stylesheet>

Or, alternatively, use xsl:element:

...
<xsl:template match="person">
  <xsl:element name="individual">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
...

Renaming attributes is just as straightforward:

<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="@lastname">
  <xsl:attribute name="surname">
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
  </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
   
</xsl:stylesheet>

Sometimes you need to re-namespace rather than rename, as shown in Example 6-6.

Example 6-6. A document using the namespace foo

<foo:someElement xmlns:foo="http://www.ora.com/XMLCookbook/namespaces/foo">
  <foo:aChild>
    <foo:aGrandChild/>
    <foo:aGrandChild>
    </foo:aGrandChild>
  </foo:aChild>
</foo:someElement>

For each element in the foo namespace, create a new element in the bar namespace, ...