How to deal with namespaces in XSLT?

Question

If I have XML like this:

  <sample>
     <a:element1 xmlns:a="..." />
     <b:element2 xmlns:b="..." />
  </sample>

it seems that XSL can't find the two child nodes of <sample> due to the prefixes a: and b:.

If I eliminate the two prefixes as well as the namespace declaration, then they are found.

The problem is that I can't do anything about the orginal XML file. So how can I find <element1> and <element2>?

Answer 1

This should work:

 <xsl:stylesheet
        xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'
        xmlns:a="http://nsa"
        xmlns:b="http://nsb"
        version='1.0'
        >
<xsl:template match="sample">
  <xsl:value-of select="a:element1/@id"/>
   <xsl:value-of select="b:element2/@id"/>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>