Why does XSLT output all text by default?

Hi I had performed a transformation which drops a tag if it is null.

I wanted to check whether my transformation is working fine, so instead of checking it manually, I wrote one more XSLT code which just checks the presence of that particular tag in the OUTPUT XML, if it is null, then the second XSLT should output a text "FOUND". (I don't actually need some XML kind of output but I am just using XSLT for searching.)

When I tried with this XSL code ::

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="/SiebelMessage//SuppressCalendar[.!='']">
      FOUND
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

It outputs all the TEXT DATA that is present in the XML file,

to avoid that, I had to write this code::

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="/SiebelMessage//SuppressCalendar[.!='']">
      FOUND
  </xsl:template>
  <xsl:template match="text()"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

why did the former code outputs TEXT, why should I insist XSL to ignore all other text? is that the behavior of all XML parsers or only of my own (I am using msxml parser).

xslt xslt-1.0 xslt-2.0

Edit Report

157

why did the former code outputs TEXT, why should I insist XSL to ignore all other text? is that the behavior of all XML parsers or only of my own

You are discovering one of the most fundamental XSLT features as specified in the Specification: the built-in templates of XSLT.

From the Spec:

There is a built-in template rule to allow recursive processing to continue in the absence of a successful pattern match by an explicit template rule in the stylesheet. This template rule applies to both element nodes and the root node. The following shows the equivalent of the built-in template rule:
<xsl:template match="*|/">
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
There is also a built-in template rule for each mode, which allows recursive processing to continue in the same mode in the absence of a successful pattern match by an explicit template rule in the stylesheet. This template rule applies to both element nodes and the root node. The following shows the equivalent of the built-in template rule for mode m.
<xsl:template match="*|/" mode="m">
  <xsl:apply-templates mode="m"/>
</xsl:template>
There is also a built-in template rule for text and attribute nodes that copies text through:
<xsl:template match="text()|@*">
  <xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>
The built-in template rule for processing instructions and comments is to do nothing.
<xsl:template match="processing-instruction()|comment()"/>
The built-in template rule for namespace node

answered 2010-07-31T14:41:53.140

Why does XSLT output all text by default?

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