Transforming XML with XSL

To use XSL Transformations (XSLT) with PHP, you have to enable extension=xsl in php.ini.

The following code transforms the quotes.xml to HTML by applying the stylesheet given by the XSLTProcessor::importStylesheet() method:

<?php
 $xml = new DOMDocument();
 $xml->load('quotes.xml');
  
 $xsl = new DOMDocument();
 $xsl->load('style.xsl');
  
 $xslt = new XsltProcessor();
 $xslt->importStylesheet($xsl);
  
 $result = $xslt->transformToDoc($xml);
 echo $result->saveXML();

Doing the transformation is a number of five easy steps:

1. Load the XML
2. Load the XSL
3. Instantiate an XsltProcessor object
4. Import XSL with importStylesheet()
5. Execute the transformation with transformToDoc() and print the result.

The preceding coding contains the code for these steps. The file style.xsl contains markup that transforms the quotes.xml into the well-known HTML tags.

Note: The XSLTProcessor::transformToDoc returns a DOMDocument object, you can use the XSLTProcessor::transformToXml for a string value:

<?php
 $xml = new DOMDocument();
 $xml->load('quotes.xml');
  
 $xsl = new DOMDocument();
 $xsl->load('style.xsl');
  
 $xslt = new XsltProcessor();
 $xslt->importStylesheet($xsl);

 echo $xslt->transformToXML($xml);

The above code returns the following output (source code):

<h1>Author XYZ</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...
<br>Year: 2023</p>

<h1>Author ABC</h1>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...
<br>Year: 2022</p>

The quotes.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<quotes>
  <quote year="2023">
    <coding>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...</coding>
    <author>Author XYZ</author>
  </quote>
  <quote year="2022">
    <coding>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua...</coding>
    <author>Author ABC</author>
  </quote>
</quotes>

The style.xsl file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:output method="html" encoding="UTF-8" indent="no"/>
  <xsl:template match="quote">
   <h1><xsl:value-of select="author"/></h1>
   <p><xsl:value-of select="coding"/>
    <br />Year: <xsl:value-of select="@year"/>
   </p>
  </xsl:template>
 </xsl:stylesheet>

To learn about the XSLT and XML visit Transforming XML with XSLT.

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Using XML: