2007 Oct 12, 4:08As noted in the
XSL Transformations spec you can create the identity transform using the xsl:copy element. With the MSXML implementation of xsl:copy
the example the spec gives produces slightly ugly elements. For instance given it produces . In order to ensure empty elements turn out pretty I've modified the example as follows:
This got me thinking about inverting XSLTs. Clearly in general an XSLT isn't invertible since an XSLT can completely ignore the input XML and produce something else entirely but then the above is an
example of an XSLT that is invertible. So there is a subset of XSLTs that are invertible, how might you produce the inverse of an XSLT, and would this ever be useful?
xml msxml inverse xlst xsl