Introduction

The XSL extension implements the XSL standard, performing XSLT transformations using the libxslt library.

Installation

PHP 5 includes the XSL extension by default and it can be enabled by adding the argument --with-xsl[=DIR] to your configure line. DIR is the libxslt installation directory. libxslt version 1.0.18 or greater is required.

Examples

In this small tutorial we will learn how to transform an XML document into HTML.

Example 1. A simple XSL tree <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="html" encoding="iso-8859-1" indent="no"/> <xsl:template match="collection"> Hey! Welcome to my sweet CD collection! <xsl:apply-templates/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="cd"> <h1><xsl:value-of select="title"/></h1> <h2>by <xsl:value-of select="artist"/></h2> <h3> - <xsl:value-of select="year"/></h3> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>

Example 2. Corresponding XML tree <collection> <cd> <title>PHP Rock</title> <artist>Joe Coder</artist> <year>2003</year> </cd> <cd> <title>Squashing Typos on a Winter's Eve</title> <artist>kennyt</artist> <year>2004</year> </cd> </collection>

Example 3. Making XML into HTML The following PHP code uses the XML and XSL extensions to transform XML into presentable HTML. <?php /* Load the two XML sources */ $xml = new DomDocument; // from /ext/dom $xml->load('example.xml'); $xsl = new DomDocument; $xsl->load('example.xsl'); /* Configure the transformer */ $proc = new xsltprocessor; $proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules echo $proc->transformToXML($xml); // actual transformation ?> This should produce an HTML fragment similar to the following: Hey! Welcome to my sweet CD collection! <h1>PHP Rock</h1> <h2>by Joe Coder</h2> <h3> - 2003</h3> <h1>Squashing Typos on a Winter's Eve</h1> <h2> by kennyt</h2> <h3> - 2004</h3>