8.5. Calculating the Value of an Element with xsl:value-of
Most of the time, the text that is
output is more closely related to the text that
is input than it was in the last couple of examples. Other XSLT
elements can select particular content from the input document and
insert it into the output document.
One of the most generally useful elements of this kind is
xsl:value-of. This element calculates the string
value of an XPath expression and inserts it into the output. The
value of an element is the text content of the element after all the
tags have been removed and entity and character references have been
resolved. The element whose value is taken is identified by a
select attribute containing an XPath expression.
For example, suppose you just want to extract the names of all the
people in the input document. Then you might use a stylesheet like
Example 8-6. Here the person template outputs only
the value of the name child element of the matched
person in between <p> and
</p> tags.
Example 8-6. A simple XSLT stylesheet that uses xsl:value-of
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="person">
<p>
<xsl:value-of select="name"/>
</p>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
When an XSLT processor applies this stylesheet to Example 8-1, it outputs this text:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<p>
Alan
Turing
</p>
<p>
Richard
P
Feynman
</p>
 |  |  | 8.4. Templates and Template Rules |  | 8.6. Applying Templates with xsl:apply-templates |
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