SAXONB-XSLT(1)

✨ SAXONB-XSLT(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the saxonb-xslt manual page, section 1 of the manual 💅 this is the command line XSLT 2.0 processor and she is that girl. let's get into it 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

saxonb-xslt — command line XSLT 2.0 processor

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

saxonb-xslt [OPTION...] [-s:SOURCEFILE] [-xsl:STYLESHEET] [-o:OUTPUT]
            [NAME=VALUE...]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

ngl this page is just a lil quick intro to the saxonb-xslt command. it was written for the Debian™ distribution because the original program does not ship a manual page 😭 instead it has HTML documentation, which lives in the libsaxonb-java-doc package. so like, go read that if you want the full lore.

so what is it? saxonb-xslt is a command line wrapper around the Saxon-B XSLT and XQuery processor. with it you can process XML documents using XSLT 2.0 stylesheets, straight from the command line, no cap. internally, saxonb-xslt is a wrapper around the Java class net.sf.saxon.Transform, which Saxon-B implements. main character energy fr fr 👑

you'll usually invoke saxonb-xslt passing the 3 options that are made explicit in the synopsis above. usually those three map to: the input XML file you wanna transform, the XSLT stylesheet describing the transformation you want, and the output file where the result gets saved. periodt. but — and this is the plot twist — the meaning of those options and whether you even need to pass them depends on a whole bunch of other options you can specify. see the option reference below, bestie, it's all there 🫶

🍓 Parameters

at the end of the command line you can drop a list of parameters. they use the syntax NAME=VALUE, so you give the parameter's name and its value together.

a parameter name prefixed with + (plus sign) gets interpreted as a filesystem path parameter. if the path points to a single file, that file gets parsed as XML and its document node becomes the parameter value. if the path points to a directory, every directly contained file gets parsed as XML files, and the sequence of their document nodes becomes the parameter value. cute, right?

a parameter name prefixed with ! (exclamation mark) gets interpreted as an output/serialization parameter. check the XSLT 2.0 and XQuery specs for more on output/serialization parameters, iykyk.

to pass parameters that belong to a non-null namespace, there's a syntax for that: {uri}localname=value.

parameters will be visible as global variables during XSLT processing — provided they've been declared with <xsl:param>. and during evaluation, provided they've been declared in the query prolog. see the XSLT spec for more on variables and their declarations 💜

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

here's a summary of everything supported, bestie. options can be passed in any order, so do your thing.

first we list the options that saxonb-xslt and saxonb-xquery share, then the ones specific to saxonb-xslt (or the ones that behave differently here).

some options are flagged as "Saxon-SA only" — those only work if Saxon-SA is installed. and heads up: Saxon-SA is a commercial product, so as such it is not available in Debian. 💀

👑 Common options

• -cr:classname — specify a class to use for processing collection URIs passed to the collection() function. the class must implement net.sf.saxon.CollectionURIResolver.
• -dtd: {[on] | [off]} — turn DTD validation on or off. default: off.
• -expand: {[on] | [off]} — when validation is enabled, expand default values in validated documents. this option enables or disables that expansion. default: on.
• -explain [:filename] — display an execution plan; the output is in XML format. if filename isn't given it gets displayed on standard output.
• -ext: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable the ability to invoke external Java functions from query files and stylesheets. beware: enabling them is a potential security risk when you're processing untrusted files. default: off.
• -l: {[on] | [off]} — keep (when on) or throw away (when off) line numbers in trees corresponding to source documents. when kept, line numbers can be accessed using the function saxon:line-number(). default: off.
• -outval: {[recover] | [fatal]} — when validation is required, set whether validation errors are fatal (when fatal is passed) or whether they only trigger warnings (when recover is). default: fatal.
• -p: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable usage of the PTreeURIResolver. Saxon-SA only.
• -r:classname — specify a class to use for resolving all URIs.
• -repeat:N — repeat the transformation N times. for benchmarking purposes, bestie.
• -sa — perform Schema-aware processing. Saxon-SA only.
• -strip: {[all] | [none] | [ignorable]} — specify the whitespace stripping policy for source documents: strip all of them (all), strip none of them (none), strip ignorable whitespace only (ignorable). default: none.
• -t — display version, timing, and other debugging information on standard error.
• -tree: {[tiny] | [linked]} — select the implementation of the internal tree model: tiny tree model (tiny) or linked tree model (linked). see the Saxon documentation for more on the internal tree model. default: tiny.
• -T [:classname] — trace various aspects of the processing; you can optionally give a class name to specify a user-chosen tracer. the class must implement net.sf.saxon.trace.TraceListener. the default is a system supplied tracer. this option implies -l.
• -TJ — enable tracing of external Java method invocation. see -ext.
• -u — force interpretation of source document names as URI. by default they're considered to be file names, unless they start with file: or http:.
• -val: {[strict] | [lax]} — when validation is enabled, choose between strict or lax validation. Saxon-SA only.
• -x:classname — specify a class to use as SAX parser for input documents. the class must implement either org.xml.sax.Parser or org.xml.sax.XMLReader.
• -xi — apply XInclude processing to all input documents.
• -xmlversion: {[1.0] | [1.1]} — choose the XML version for processing input documents. you must specify 1.1 to process XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 constructs. default: 1.0.
• -? — display a help message and exit.

🧚 Options specific to saxonb-xslt

• -a — use the "<?xml-stylesheet ... ?>" processing instruction from the source document to find the stylesheet to be used. this option is not compatible with -xsl.
• -c:filename — use the compiled stylesheet stored in filename. this option is not compatible with -xsl.
• -im:modename — use modename as the initial mode used for the transformation. qualified modes can be specified as "{uri}localname".
• -it:templatename — use templatename as the initial named template for the transformation. when this option is used, -xsl is optional.
• -m:classname — specify a class to use as the receiver for messages generated by <xsl:message>. the class must implement net.sf.saxon.event.Receiver.
• -o:path — specify the path to use for saving generated output. usually path points to a filename where the main result document will be saved. if it's not specified, such a document gets written to standard output. additional output documents generated using the <xsl:result-document> command use path as the basename for the "href" attribute of the command. if -o is missing they'll be saved relatively to the current working directory. when -s identifies a directory, -o should identify one too. all the output documents will then be written under that directory.
• -or:classname — specify a class to use as the output resolver for the "href" attribute of <xsl:result-document>. the class must implement net.sf.saxon.OutputURIResolver.
• -s:path — specify the input file or directory. this option is required unless -it has been given. if path points to a filename, that file gets parsed as an XML document and its document node becomes the context item at the beginning of the transformation. the special filename - can be used to require reading the input document from standard input. if path points to a directory, all files directly contained in it get individually transformed. in that case -o is required. -u affects the interpretation of path.
• -versmsg: {[on] | [off]} — enable or disable the warning about using an XSLT 2.0 processor (which Saxon-B is) on stylesheets which specify version="1.0" in their root element. default: on.
• -warnings: {[silent] | [recover] | [fatal]} — set the policy for handling recoverable errors: silent for silent recovery, recover for recovery with warning output on standard error, fatal for no recovery. default: recover.
• -xsl:filename — specify the main XSLT stylesheet to be used for the transformation. this option is required unless -a or -c are specified. the special filename - can be used to require reading the stylesheet from standard input. -u affects the interpretation of filename.
• -y:filename — specify a class to use as SAX parser for stylesheets. the class must implement either org.xml.sax.Parser or org.xml.sax.XMLReader. see also -x.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

saxonb-xquery (1), XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 2.0 (W3C Recommendation).

this program is fully documented by the HTML documentation of Saxon, available in the libsaxon-java-doc Debian package.

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💖 AUTHOR 💖

this manual page was written by Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> for the Debian™ system (but it may be used by others, we love sharing 🫶). permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

on Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.

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🎀 COPYRIGHT 🎀

Copyright © 2008 Stefano Zacchiroli

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 💅✨ this was the saxonb-xslt(1) man page, from February 2008 — go forth and transform some XML, you've got this 🦋👑