What is XSLT?

Estimated study time: 15 minutes.

XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other formats — HTML, plain text, or even a different XML structure — using rule-based templates.

How XSLT Works

An XSLT stylesheet is itself an XML document containing templates — rules that say "when you find a node matching this XPath, output this content." The XSLT processor applies these templates to the source document to produce the output.

A Minimal Example

<!-- course.xml -->
<course>
  <title>Data Analytics</title>
</course>

<!-- transform.xsl -->
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="course">
    <h1><xsl:value-of select="title"/></h1>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Applying this stylesheet to course.xml produces <h1>Data Analytics</h1>.

Common Use Cases

• Converting XML data into readable HTML reports.
• Transforming one XML vocabulary into another for a different system.
• Generating plain-text or CSV output from structured XML.