XSL: Avoid exporting namespace definitions to resulting XML documents

export, msxsl, namespaces, xml, xslt

Solution

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.

Problem

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.

Original source