Using XSLT to copy part of an XML as HTML - xslt

Question

I'm using an XSL document to format an XML into HTML.
Part of the XML is an HTML fragment. For example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="formatter.xsl"?>
<root>
<some-node>text</some-node>
<another-node>text</another-node>
<html-container>
<p>This is an HTML with links and <i>other stuff</i>.</p>
<p>And on and on it goes...</p>
</html-container>
</root>
My XSL does lots of manipulations on the XML, but the part inside <html-container> needs to be copied to the new XML as is - all HTML nodes and attributes.
I've tried using this template:
<xsl:template match="html-container/*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#* | node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
But this copies just the child nodes, no other descendants:
<p>This is an HTML with links and other stuff.</p>
<p>And on and on it goes...</p>
I've also tried:
<xsl:template match="html-container//*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#* | node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
But then the attributes are copied as text:
<p>This is an HTML with <a>http://www.google.com_blanklinks</a> and <i>other stuff</i>.</p>
<p>And on and on it goes...</p>
Obviously I'm missing something. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

If you are using xsl:apply-templates, then you should usually have templates that match the nodes and attributes you select. The one you tried, that matched html-container//* will only match elements, but you also need to match attributes as well.
<xsl:template match="html-container//*|html-container//#*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#* | node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
Note, this is very much like the XSLT identity template, which would look like this:
<xsl:template match="#*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
This would match elements outside html-container, which may or may not affect your current XSLT.
Alternatively, if the descendants of html-container need to be copies as-is, without any changes, just use xsl:copy-of instead
<xsl:template match="html-container/*">
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>