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XSLT <xsl:value-of> Element

The <xsl:value-of> element is used to extract the value of a selected node.

The <xsl:value-of> Element

The <xsl:value-of> element can be used to extract the value of an XML element and add it to the output stream of the transformation:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<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>
     <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="catalog/cd/title"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="catalog/cd/artist"/></td>
     </tr>
   </table>
 </body>
 </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Note: The value of the select attribute is an XPath expression. An XPath expression works like navigating a file system; where a forward slash (/) selects subdirectories.

The result of the transformation above will look like this:

My CD Collection

Title	Artist
Empire Burlesque	Bob Dylan

View the XML file, View the XSL file, and View the result

The result from this example was also a little disappointing, because only one line of data was copied from the XML document to the output.

In the next chapter you will learn how to use the <xsl:for-each> element to loop through the XML elements, and display all of the records.