Inside XSLT

Creating Match Patterns

As you might expect from the discussion on how "child::MASS" can be abbreviated as "MASS", and the use of patterns such as "/", "/PLANETS", and so on, it’s going to take a little work to get thoroughly familiar with creating match patterns— Chapter 4 is devoted to doing that.

Match patterns are a subset of the full XPath language, and you use them in <xsl:template>, <xsl:key>, and <xsl:number>. In particular, you can set the match attribute of <xsl:template> and <xsl:key>, and the count and from attributes of <xsl:number> to a pattern. The following list includes a few examples of match patterns; you’ll see many more in Chapter 4 during the detailed discussion on using Xpath to select nodes and attributes:

• "/" Matches ...