Huddled Masses » Xsl http://huddledmasses.org You can do more than breathe for free... Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:42:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Ignoring Namespaces in XPath http://huddledmasses.org/ignoring-namespaces-in-xpath/ http://huddledmasses.org/ignoring-namespaces-in-xpath/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:32:51 +0000 Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett http://huddledmasses.org/?p=1348 I know that I just wrote a post last week about XPath and namespaces in PowerShell, but at the time I left out one possible way of dealing with namespaces, because it’s not the right way of doing things. However, sometimes it’s nice to have options, and when you’re working on the command-line in PowerShell, or just trying to figure out a proof-of-concept call to a web service, you really don’t need to deal with namespaces correctly, you just need it to work.

With that in mind, I present to you the fourth option: just strip the namespaces out! The simplest way to do that is to run the XML through an XSL stylesheet which just outputs the local-name() of each node (including attributes), and remove any namespace definitions (processing instructions).

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes">
   <xsl:template match="/|comment()|processing-instruction()">
      <xsl:copy>
         <xsl:apply-templates>
      </xsl:apply-templates>
   </xsl:copy>

   <xsl:template match="*">
      <xsl:element name="{local-name()}">
         <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()">
      </xsl:apply-templates>
   </xsl:element>

   <xsl:template match="@*">
      <xsl:attribute name="{local-name()}">
         <xsl:value-of select=".">
      </xsl:value-of>
   </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template></xsl:template></xsl:template></xsl:output></xsl:stylesheet>

That stylesheet and the basic steps of the process will work anywhere, from Java to C# to the web … but since my current language of choice for prototyping is PowerShell, I’ll show you how to implement it there as Remove-XmlNamespace. Once you have that, I think you’ll see that it was relatively simple for me to write a new Select-XML which adds a parameter RemoveNamespace which is implemented by calling this Remove-XmlNamespace …

That actually allows you to call Select-Xml with the -RemoveNamespace parameter just as though the namespaces didn’t exist. Of course, the returned XML nodes will, in fact, NOT have namespaces … so they may not be quite the same as the source, but the data will all be there. :-)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
]]> http://huddledmasses.org/ignoring-namespaces-in-xpath/feed/ 0 Convert-Xml with XSLT in PowerShell http://huddledmasses.org/convert-xml-with-xslt-in-powershell/ http://huddledmasses.org/convert-xml-with-xslt-in-powershell/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:54:04 +0000 Joel 'Jaykul' Bennett http://HuddledMasses.org/convert-xml-with-xslt-in-powershell/ Just a quick post to upload a simple PowerShell script that transforms XML files with XSL files. There’s actually a cmdlet in PowerShell Community Extensions which does this, but believe it or not, in all my tests the script outperforms the cmdlet (the cmdlet takes, on average, 117ms on a file which takes the script 63ms on average).

function Convert-WithXslt($originalXmlFilePath, $xslFilePath, $outputFilePath)
{
   ## Simplistic error handling
   $xslFilePath = resolve-path $xslFilePath
   if( -not (test-path $xslFilePath) ) { throw "Can't find the XSL file" }
   $originalXmlFilePath = resolve-path $originalXmlFilePath
   if( -not (test-path $originalXmlFilePath) ) { throw "Can't find the XML file" }
   $outputFilePath = resolve-path $outputFilePath
   if( -not (test-path (split-path $originalXmlFilePath)) ) { throw "Can't find the output folder" }

   ## Get an XSL Transform object (try for the new .Net 3.5 version first)
   $EAP = $ErrorActionPreference
   $ErrorActionPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
   $script:xslt = new-object system.xml.xsl.xslcompiledtransform
   trap [System.Management.Automation.PSArgumentException]
   {  # no 3.5, use the slower 2.0 one
      $ErrorActionPreference = $EAP
      $script:xslt = new-object system.xml.xsl.xsltransform
   }
   $ErrorActionPreference = $EAP
   
   ## load xslt file
   $xslt.load( $xslFilePath )
     
   ## transform
   $xslt.Transform( $originalXmlFilePath, $outputFilePath )
}
]]> http://huddledmasses.org/convert-xml-with-xslt-in-powershell/feed/ 2