Removing a div tag in variable of xsl file - xslt

Question

I have to remove a div(menu) with an ul tag in it. All the data is stored in a variable $data. I have remove that div in that variable through xslt
Before:
<div id="container>
<div id="menu">
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
After
<div id="container>
</div>

Answer 1

Well if you know there is only the div id="menu" in that container div then you could make a shallow copy of that container div. In general, with XSLT 1.0, a variable will be a result tree fragment, to process it further with XSLT/XPath (other than outputting it with value-of or copy-of) you need to use exsl:node-set on the variable. Then you could process the elements with the identity transformation and a template for the div[#id = 'menu'] that does not process it to delete it (online at http://xsltransform.net/bFN1y9C):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"
xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common" exclude-result-prefixes="exsl">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:variable name="data">
<div id="container">
<div id="menu">
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:template match="#*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:variable name="data2">
<xsl:apply-templates select="exsl:node-set($data)/node()"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:template match="div[#id = 'menu']"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="$data2"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>
If you need to perform other transformation steps you might need to separate the different steps by using modes.