XSLT Introduction

XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) is a styling language for XML.

XSLT stands for XSL Transformations.

This tutorial will teach you how to use XSLT to transform XML documents into other formats (like transforming XML into HTML).


Online XSLT Editor

With our online editor, you can edit XML and XSLT code, and click on a button to view the result.

XSLT Example

<?xml version="1.0"?>

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

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h2>My CD Collection</h2>
    <table border="1">
      <tr bgcolor="#9acd32">
        <th>Title</th>
        <th>Artist</th>
      </tr>
      <xsl:for-each select="catalog/cd">
        <tr>
          <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>
          <td><xsl:value-of select="artist"/></td>
        </tr>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
Try it Yourself »

Click on the "Try it Yourself" button to see how it works.


What You Should Already Know

Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:

  • HTML
  • XML

If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our Home page.


XSLT References

XSLT Elements

Description of all the XSLT elements from the W3C Recommendation, and information about browser support.

XSLT, XPath, and XQuery Functions

XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0, share the same functions library. There are over 100 built-in functions. There are functions for string values, numeric values, date and time comparison, node and QName manipulation, sequence manipulation, and more.


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