XSLTProcessor::transformToDoc

(PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

XSLTProcessor::transformToDoc — Transform to a document

Description

public XSLTProcessor::transformToDoc(object $document, ?string $returnClass = null): object|false

Transforms the source node to a document (e.g. DOMDocument) applying the stylesheet given by the XSLTProcessor::importStylesheet() method.

Parameters

document: The Dom\Document, DOMDocument, SimpleXMLElement or libxml-compatible object to be transformed.
returnClass: This optional parameter may be used so that XSLTProcessor::transformToDoc() will return an object of the specified class. That class should either extend or be the same class as document's class.

Errors/Exceptions

The following errors are possible when using an expression that invokes PHP callbacks.

Throws an Error if a PHP callback is invoked but there were no callbacks registered, or if the named callback was not registered.
Throws a TypeError if the php:function syntax is used and the handler name is not a string.
Throws an Error if a non-DOM object was returned from a callback.

Return Values

The resulting document or false on error.

Changelog

Version	Description
8.4.0	Now throws an Error if the callback cannot be invoked, instead of emitting a warning.
8.4.0	Added support for Dom\Document.

Examples

Example #1 Transforming to a DOMDocument

<?php

// Load the XML source
$xml = new DOMDocument;
$xml->load('collection.xml');

$xsl = new DOMDocument;
$xsl->load('collection.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc = new XSLTProcessor;
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

echo trim($proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText);

?>

The above example will output:

Hey! Welcome to Nicolas Eliaszewicz's sweet CD collection!

Example #2 Transforming to a Dom\Document

<?php

$xml = Dom\XMLDocument::createFromFile('collection.xml');
$xsl = Dom\XMLDocument::createFromFile('collection.xsl');

// Configure the transformer
$proc = new XSLTProcessor;
$proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // attach the xsl rules

echo trim($proc->transformToDoc($xml)->firstChild->wholeText);

?>

The above example will output:

Hey! Welcome to Nicolas Eliaszewicz's sweet CD collection!

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User Contributed Notes

franp at free dot fr

18 years ago

In most cases if you expect XML (or XHTML) as output you better use transformToXML() directly. You gain better control over xsl:output attributes, notably omit-xml-declaration.

Instead of :
$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->importStylesheet($xsl);
$dom = $proc->transformToDoc($xml);
echo $dom->saveXML();

do use : 
$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->importStylesheet($xsl);
$newXml = $proc->transformToXML($xml);
echo $newXml;

In the first case, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> is added whatever you set the omit-xml-declaration while transformToXML() take the attribute into account.