Excluding elements with xslt not working - xslt

Question

I am trying to transform an xml file that contain a list of words and I am trying to exclude some elements from the resulting document, more concretely and
My List is as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="merge.xsl"?>
<dic:englishWords xmlns:dic = "dictionary">
<dic:words>
<dic:englishWords xmlns:dic = "dictionary">
<dic:title>
English Dictionary
</dic:title>
<dic:author>
<dic:authorsName>
Author:
<dic:name>
User
</dic:name>
<dic:lastName>
Name
</dic:lastName>
</dic:authorsName>
</dic:author>
<dic:words>
<dic:name>Water</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Room</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Computer</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Book</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Garage</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Car</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Ship</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Food</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Coffee</dic:name><br/>
<dic:name>Program</dic:name><br/>
</dic:words>
</dic:englishWords>
The path to the list of words is contained in an xml file as follows:
<dic:dictionary xmlns:dic = "dictionary">
<dic:Logo>Logo</dic:Logo>
<dic:Author>User Name</dic:Author>
<dic:EnglishWords>english</dic:EnglishWords>
<dic:SwedishTranslation>swedish</dic:SwedishTranslation>
<dic:SwedishWords>swedish</dic:SwedishWords>
<dic:EnglishTranslation>english</dic:EnglishTranslation>
</dic:dictionary>
my transformation is as follows
<!--Declare a parameter with the nodes to be removed-->
<xsl:param name="removeElementsNamed" select="'|dic:author|dic:title'"/>
<!--create a template and call it remove node-->
<xsl:template match="node()|#*" name="removeNode">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|#*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<!--remove the actual nodes-->
<xsl:template match="*">
<xsl:if test="not(contains($removeElementsNamed, concat('|',name(),'|')))">
<xsl:call-template name="removeNode"/>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
I am trying to follow an example which I have found here:
how to exclude elements
...but in my case it does not work.
Any help will be appreciated...
Bluetxxth

Answer 1

So it looks like you're trying to exclude elements based on whether |ELEMENTNAME| is present in $removeElementsNamed, but dic:author is the only item in that list that has pipes on both sides. It might almost work if you did this:
<xsl:param name="removeElementsNamed" select="'|dic:author|dic:title|'"/>
However this is a bit of a hack.
A better approach would to just do something like this:
<xsl:template match="dic:author | dic:title" />
This should exclude dic:author and dic:title from the output.
Another issue is that this template is misnamed:
<xsl:template match="node()|#*" name="removeNode">
What this template would actually do, if it worked, would be to include nodes that were sent its way, but a template can't both have a match attribute and a name attribute. I would suggest rewriting your XSLT to be like this and starting from here:
<!--Declare a parameter with the nodes to be removed-->
<xsl:template match="dic:author | dic:title" />
<!--create a template and call it remove node-->
<xsl:template match="node()|#*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|#*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

Answer 2

You could match the element you don't want but not output anything.
<xsl:template match="nodeToMatch" />