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xml element names contain colons


Sparkie

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I'm running an XSLT against a 3rd party XML file that has element names that contain colons, i.e. <prefix:name>. Anyway if I rename the element to <prefixname> everything works as expected, but I get nothing if I try <xsl:value-of select="prefix:name"/> - a big blank where that info should be.

I know it's recommended that you don't use element names with colons, but I can't do anything about this and I can't go through all their files to rename these elements. BUT, 1. it's only a recommendation, so shouldn't I get something? and 2. is there some way around this?

thanks for any help

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XML started without a concept of namespaces but it got added soon. And nowadays most of XML is processed in a namespace-aware mode where names with colons are allowed but have a special meaning, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_namespace.

So normally an XML documents looks like

 

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">...</html>

or

 

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

 

As for XPath and XSLT and XQuery, they all operate on XML with namespaces.

 

If you have a namespace well-formed XML input document like

 

<root>  <prefix:name xmlns:prefix="http://example.org/">foo</prefix:name></root>

then your XSLT needs to declare the namespace as well e.g.

 

 

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"  xmlns:prefix="http://example.org/"> <xsl:template match="root">   <xsl:value-of select="prefix:name"/></xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

 

If you still have problems, post your XML sample.

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