Re: Copying most of an XML document

> Here is my magnolia tree - I need it copied exactly but I want to remove
> every caterpillar. Unfortunately it is infested with caterpillars
> throughout.

This is a very common question -- I swear it was even asked last week. You 
want to use the identity transformation and modify it slightly:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#copying


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

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

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

<xsl:template match="caterpillar" />

</xsl:stylesheet>

This assume that you want to remove every "caterpillar" element along with 
its descendants.

> Basically I want to do something like copy every single node, children 
and
> attributes and all, but whenever I find (e.g.) an <a> node I want to 
ignore
> it. If I could somehow tell 'xsl:copy-of' what to ignore that would be 
all I
> needed (but I can't). If I knew the full structure of the file I could
> create templates to match and replicate all the nodes I wanted to keep
> without losing any of their attributes, but sadly this XML has been
> generated by Framemaker (from unstructured original documents) and there 
is
> no document definition to work from.

All you really need to know is the names of the elements and/or attributes 
you _don't_ want to keep.

Dave