XSLT to Remove Elements with Specific Attributes?

[Aaron Davies]

I'm new to XSLT, and thought I'd start off with (what I hoped was) a
fairly simple transform, but I can't make heads or tails of the
example code I've found around the web. I'd like to a transform that
copies input to output, except that elements of a specific type with
attributes with specific values (and all their content) are omitted
completely. An example would be processing XHTML and dropping all P
paragraphs with class="foo". I assume this is fairly easily derivable
from an identity filter, but I'm not sure where to start. Any help
would be much appreciated.

 

[Martin Honnen]

I'm new to XSLT, and thought I'd start off with (what I hoped was) a
fairly simple transform, but I can't make heads or tails of the
example code I've found around the web. I'd like to a transform that
copies input to output, except that elements of a specific type with
attributes with specific values (and all their content) are omitted
completely. An example would be processing XHTML and dropping all P
paragraphs with class="foo". I assume this is fairly easily derivable
from an identity filter, but I'm not sure where to start. Any help
would be much appreciated.

<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
version="1.0">

<xsl:template match="xhtml[@class = 'foo']"/>

<xsl:template match="@* | node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

 

[Aaron Davies]

I'm new to XSLT, and thought I'd start off with (what I hoped was) a
fairly simple transform, but I can't make heads or tails of the
example code I've found around the web. I'd like to a transform that
copies input to output, except that elements of a specific type with
attributes with specific values (and all their content) are omitted
completely. An example would be processing XHTML and dropping all P
paragraphs with class="foo". I assume this is fairly easily derivable
from an identity filter, but I'm not sure where to start. Any help
would be much appreciated.

<xsl:stylesheet
   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
   xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   version="1.0">

   <xsl:template match="xhtml[@class = 'foo']"/>

   <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
     </xsl:copy>
   </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

hmm. looks reasonable, but doesn't seem to work on the actual document
i'm trying to change.

i'm trying to hack up an rss feed, and the paragraphs i want to remove
are in the description section. actually, i'm not sure this is doable
with XSLT at all--on closer inspection, the description is a blob of
presumably opaque text, and what ends up as tags in the browser is
ampersand encoded in the actual feed.

should i give up and use sed?

 

[Martin Honnen]

hmm. looks reasonable, but doesn't seem to work on the actual document
i'm trying to change.

i'm trying to hack up an rss feed, and the paragraphs i want to remove
are in the description section. actually, i'm not sure this is doable
with XSLT at all--on closer inspection, the description is a blob of
presumably opaque text, and what ends up as tags in the browser is
ampersand encoded in the actual feed.

RSS usually does not contain well-formed XHTML markup but rather escaped
HTML tag soup. So processing that escaped HTML tag soup with XML tools
like XSLT is difficult.
You could try to parse the escaped markup with an extension function
like
http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/extensions/functions/parse.html
but even that will only work if the escaped markup is well-formed XML
and not HTML tag soup.

 

[The Magpie]

RSS usually does not contain well-formed XHTML markup

RSS *ought* to contain well-formed XML or, to be more accurate,
properly constructed RDF (which is an XML content pattern). As to
whether or not it actually *does*....