XML Hacks

Choose Your Output Format in XSLT

Take control of the output of an XSLT stylesheet.

The output element in XSLT has 10 attributes, each controlling a different aspect of XSLT output. This hack lists each of these attributes and shows you how to use them. All of output’s attributes are optional.

An XSLT stylesheet can have more than one output element, and the values found in the attributes of those elements are combined. However, if a given attribute occurs on more than one output element, the last occurrence trumps all previous occurrences. Nevertheless, it is technically an error if an attribute (aside from cdata-section-elements) occurs on more than one output element in the stylesheet; however, processors can recover by choosing the value from the last output in the stylesheet.

Output method

The method attribute can have the value xml, html, or text for XML, HTML, and text output, respectively. XSLT 2.0 will support a value of xhtml for XHTML support. The method attribute can also have a QName as a value, but the QName must be recognized by the application processing it. If the first element in the result is html, the default method is html; xml if otherwise.

Indentation

The indent attribute takes the value yes or no. This tells the XSLT processor to indent the output to the result tree, which helps make output more readable. A value of yes is the default for the html output method, no for the xml output method.

XML declaration

The omit-xml-declaration attribute can have a value of ...