p:delete (3.0)

Delete nodes in documents.

Summary
Description
Examples
- Basic usage
Additional details
Errors raised
Reference information

Summary

<p:declare-step type="p:delete">
  <input port="source" primary="true" content-types="xml html" sequence="false"/>
  <output port="result" primary="true" content-types="text xml html" sequence="false"/>
  <option name="match" as="xs:string" required="true"/>
</p:declare-step>

The p:delete step deletes nodes, specified by an XSLT selection pattern, from the document appearing on its source port.

Ports:

Type	Port	Primary?	Content types	Seq?	Description
`input`	`source`	`true`	`xml html`	`false`	The document to delete the nodes from.
`output`	`result`	`true`	`text xml html`	`false`	The resulting document.

Options:

Name	Type	Req?	Description
`match`	`xs:string` (XSLT selection pattern)	`true`	The XSLT match pattern for the nodes to delete, as a string.

Description

The p:delete step takes the XSLT match pattern in the match option and holds this against the document appearing on its source port. Any matching nodes are deleted (including child nodes, if any). The resulting document appears on the result port.

Note that deleting an element means that the entire element, including child elements, gets deleted. If you just want to delete the element but keep its child elements, you need p:unwrap.

Examples

Basic usage

The following example deletes all <text> elements with an attribute type="normal" from the source document.

Source document:

<texts>
   <text>Hello there!</text>
   <text>This is funny…</text>
   <text type="normal">And that's normal.</text>
   <text type="normal">Very normal…</text>
</texts>

Pipeline document:

<p:declare-step xmlns:p="http://www.w3.org/ns/xproc" version="3.0">

  <p:input port="source"/>
  <p:output port="result"/>

  <p:delete match="text[@type eq 'normal']"/>
  
</p:declare-step>

Result document:

<texts>
   <text>Hello there!</text>
   <text>This is funny…</text>
</texts>

Additional details

p:delete preserves all document-properties of the document(s) appearing on its source port.
This step cannot remove namespaces, if you try this XC0023 is raised. For removing namespaces use p:namespace-delete.
Deleting an xml:base attribute does not change the base URI of the element on which it occurred.

Errors raised

Error code	Description
`XC0023`	It is a dynamic error if the selection pattern matches a wrong type of node.
`XC0062`	It is a dynamic error if the `match` option matches a namespace node.

Reference information

This description of the p:delete step is for XProc version: 3.0. This is a required step (an XProc 3.0 processor must support this).

The formal specification for the p:delete step can be found here.

The p:delete step is part of categories:

The p:delete step is also present in version: 3.1.