"Eddy C" <eddy73@g...> wrote in message 
news:1128466924.702660.210370@g......
> I'm trying to strip an XML document of unwanted nodes such that in the
> example below I would keep all the parent nodes of a child node I
> wanted and for other parents which do not have the child requested they
> would be stripped.
>
> I understand I could use XSLT but I'm doing this in java and was
> wondering if there was a preferred approach out there.
>
>
> Before
> <a>
>  <b>
>    <c>fdfdsf</c>
>  </b>
>  <b>
>    <x>dffsd</x>
>  </b>
>  <b>
>    <x>dffsd</x>
>    <c>fdfdsf</c>
>  </b>
> </a>
>
> After requesting to keep child c
> <a>
>  <b>
>    <c>fdfdsf</c>
>  </b>
>  <b>
>    <c>fdfdsf</c>
>  </b>
> </a>


Use:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*[not(descendant-or-self::c)]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>


Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev