Parsing nested tags through XSLT

Question

I have a XML file like this -

<item>
    <item>
        <tag>value</tag>
        <tag2>value</tag2>
    </item>
</item>

I'd like to extract out the inner tag so it looks like this -

<item>
    <tag>value</tag>
    <tag2>value</tag2>
</item>

Is this possible through XSLT?

The outer <item> and </item> are guaranteed to be the first and last lines of the XML document if that helps.

Answer 1

If you want to extract just leaf elements (those that have no child elements of their own) then something as simple as

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="/*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:copy-of select="descendant::*[not(*)]" />
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

will do the job.

Answer 2

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:copy-of select="//item[not(item)]"/>
</xsl:template>

extracts those item elements that do not contain other item elements.