Preserve certain html tags during XSLT

Question

I have looked up solutions on stackflow, but none of them seem to work for me. Here is my question. Lets say I have the following text :

Source:

<greatgrandparent>
<grandparent>
    <parent>
         <sibling>
              Hey, im the sibling .
          </sibling>
        <description>
        $300$ <br/> $250 <br/> $200! <br/> <p> Yes, that is right! <br/> You can own a ps3 for only $200 </p>
        </description>
    </parent>
    <parent>
         ... (SAME FORMAT)
    </parent>
       ... (Several more parents)
</grandparent>
</greatgrandparent>

Output:

 <newprice>
        $300$ <br/> $250 <br/> $200! <br/> Yes, that is right! <br/> You can own a ps3 for only $200  
    </newprice>

I can't seem to find a way to do that.

Current XSL:

    <xsl:template match="/">
            <xsl:apply-templates />
        </xsl:template>

        <xsl:template match="greatgrandparents">
            <xsl:apply-templates />
        </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match = "grandparent">

    <xsl:for-each select = "parent" >
          <newprice>
             <xsl:apply-templates>
           </newprice>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template> 

<xsl:template match="description"> 
    <xsl:element name="newprice"> 
       <xsl:apply-templates/> 
    </xsl:element> 
</xsl:template> 

<xsl:template match="p"> 
   <xsl:apply-templates/> 
</xsl:template> 

Answer 1

Shouldn't the contents of be inside a CDATA element? And then probably disable output encoding on xsl:value-of..

Answer 2

You should look into xsl:copy-of.

You would probably wind up with somthing like:

<xsl:template match="description">
    <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>

Answer 3

Use templates to define behavior on specific elements

<!-- after standard identity template -->

<xsl:template match="description">
    <xsl:element name="newprice">
       <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="p">
   <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

The first template says to swap description with newprice. The second one says to ignore the p element.

If you're unfamiliar with the identity template, take a look here for a few examples.

EDIT: Given the new example, we can see that you want to only extract the description element and its contents. Notice that the template action starts with the match="/" template. We can use this control where our stylesheet starts and thus skip much of the riffraff we want to filter out.

change the <xsl:template match="/"> to something more like:

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="//description"/>   
        <!-- use a more specific XPath if you can -->
    </xsl:template>

So altogether our solution looks like this:

<xsl:stylesheet 
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0"
    exclude-result-prefixes="xs">

<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="//description" />
</xsl:template>

<!-- this is the identity template -->
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="description">
    <xsl:element name="newprice">
       <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="p">
   <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 4

Probably the shortest solution is this one:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&gt;
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="description">
   <newprice>
     <xsl:copy-of select="node()"/>
   </newprice>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="text()[not(ancestor::description)]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document, the wanted result is produced:

<newprice>
        $300$ <br /> $250 <br /> $200! <br /> <p> Yes, that is right! <br /> You can own a ps3 for only $200 </p>
        </newprice>

Do note:

1. The use of <xsl:copy-of select="node()"/> to copy all the subtree rooted in description, without the root itself.

2. How we override (with a specific, empty template) the XSLT built-in template, preventing any text nodes that are not descendents of a <description> element, to be output.