XSLT, 2nd Edition

Name

<xsl:processing-instruction>

Creates a processing instruction in the output document.

Category

Instruction.

Required Attribute

name

Defines the name (also known as the target) of this processing instruction.

Optional Attribute

[2.0] select

Defines an expression that creates the data for the processing instruction. If the select attribute is used, the <xsl:processing-instruction> must be empty.

Content

An XSLT template. The contents of the template become the data of the processing instruction.

Appears in

<xsl:processing-instruction> appears inside a template.

Defined in

[1.0] XSLT section 7.3, “Creating Processing Instructions.”

[2.0] XSLT section 11.6, “Creating Processing Instructions.”

Example

We’ll demonstrate a stylesheet that adds a processing instruction to an XML document. The processing instruction will associate the stylesheet docbook.xsl with this XML document. Here is our stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- processing-instruction.xsl -->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:output method="xml"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:processing-instruction name="xml-stylesheet">href="docbook/
html/docbook.xsl" type="text/xsl"</xsl:processing-instruction>
    <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

(The <xsl:processing-instruction> element should all be on one line.) This stylesheet simply uses the <xsl:copy-of> element to copy the input document to the result tree, adding a processing instruction along the way. We’ll use our ...