XSL: Avoid exporting namespace definitions to resulting XML documents

Question

I'd like to take data from some XML files and transform them into a new XML document. However, I do not want the definition of a namespace in the XSLT to occur in the result document.

In other words:

source:

<Namespace:Root xmlns:Namespace="http://www.something.com">

stylesheet:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:Namespace="http://www.something.com">

result:

<resultRoot xmlns:Namespace="http://www.something.com">
<!--I don't want the Namespace definition above-->

I am using msxsl for the transformation.

Answer 1

You can use the exclude-result-prefixes attribute of the xsl:stylesheet element to avoid emitting namespace prefixes into the output document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
         xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
         xmlns:prefix1="http://www.something.com"
         exclude-result-prefixes="prefix1">

</xsl:stylesheet>

To suppress multiple namespaces from the output document specify them separated by whitespace:

exclude-result-prefixes="prefix1 prefix2 prefix3"

From the XSLT specification:

When a stylesheet uses a namespace declaration only for the purposes of addressing the source tree, specifying the prefix in the exclude-result-prefixes attribute will avoid superfluous namespace declarations in the result tree.

Answer 2

divo's answer was already chosen, and appropriately so.

But if you're interested in digging deeper, check out the "Too many namespaces" section in my magnum opus on the wildly popular topic of "Namespaces in XSLT". (Yes, that's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. :-) )

Answer 3

use extension-element-prefixes="Namespace"

like:

<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:datetime="http://exslt.org/dates-and-times"
xmlns:str="http://exslt.org/strings"
xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common"
xmlns:uw="xalan://ru.sbtc.util.XSLUtil"
extension-element-prefixes="exsl str datetime uw"
version="1.0">