Converting HTML to XML using XSLT

Question

I'm trying to convert an XHTML document to XML using XSLT but I'm currently having trouble getting my templates to match the tags in the input document. Should I be able to convert XHTML to XML like this? If so is there an error in my stylesheet?

Input Document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
    <head>      
        <title>title text</title>       
    </head>
    <body>      
        <p>body text</p>
    </body>
</html>

Stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" />


    <xsl:template match="/"> 
    <article>       
        <xsl:apply-templates select="html/head"></xsl:apply-templates>
    </article>
    </xsl:template>



    <xsl:template match="html/head">
        <head><xsl:text>This is where all the metadata will come from</xsl:text></head>
    </xsl:template> 
</xsl:stylesheet>

Expected Output

<article>       
  <head>This is where all the metadata will come from</head>        
</article>

Thanks

ColinE · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-23 10:50:25Z

9

The elements within your XHTML document are in the http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml namespace. Whereas your XSLT document is matching elements that do not have a namespace. You need to add a namespace as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                xmlns:xhtml="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf">

    ...
    <xsl:template match="xhtml:html/xhtml:head">
        <head><xsl:text>This is where all the metadata will come from</xsl:text></head>
    </xsl:template> 
</xsl:stylesheet>

answered May 23, 2013 at 10:50

ColinE

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2 Comments

JimS Over a year ago

Thanks, that's worked. I didn't realise I needed to use the namespace in the transform as the tags in the input document aren't explicitly declared using the namespace like <xhtml:title>

Michael Kay Over a year ago

You're not alone. Someone asks this question nearly every day.

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