Special Edition Using XSLT

Getting the Content of an Element

As you scan down Listing 2.3, you’ll see the first XSLT element, <xsl:value-of>. The purpose of the <value-of> element is to retrieve the content from an element or an attribute. The <value-of> element takes an optional select attribute and a pattern (or location path) that allows you to specify a node or collection of nodes from which to get content. In this case, Listing 2.3 uses <xsl:value-of select="invoice/clientName"> to grab the content from the <clientName> element in the source tree and insert it into the result tree.

In constructing the pattern, you’ll notice that the step pattern does not contain a beginning slash to tell the processor to begin its search at the root node. The reason is that the template ...