XML with empty prefix transformation with XSLT

Question

I'm willing to use XSLT to transform XML files to other XML files by removing (TextLine) elements. However, the elements are not removed as I expect in the output XML files. I imagine that I'll have to modify the XSLT file, but I don't know how. Let me know what should be done.

I suspect that the root cause of the issue is that elements in the XML files have an empty prefix namespace.

The details are the following ones.

An XML test-01.xml file that contains empty prefix namespace elements:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<alto xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/ns-v4#"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/ns-v4# http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/v4/alto-4-2.xsd">
    <TextLine TAGREFS="LT9"/>
    <TextLine TAGREFS="LT10"/>
    <TextLine TAGREFS="LT9"/>
    <TextLine TAGREFS="LT8"/>
</alto>

And I'm using the following date.xslt file:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

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

    <xsl:template match="TextLine"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Note: I'm using python lxml to perform the transformation. However, this shouldn't have any influence on the process as I could use any other XML transformer as xsltproc.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 09 '21 at 10:46

Yes. Your assumption that that the default namespace was the cause of your XSLT not functioning as desired was correct. Try this XSLT-1.0 instead:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
xmlns:loc="http://www.loc.gov/standards/alto/ns-v4#">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

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

    <xsl:template match="loc:TextLine"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>

XML with empty prefix transformation with XSLT

1 Answers1