Greetings,

In past projects I have built XSLT pipelines using XQuery as the 'driver' language - it works, and it works well in BaseX, while requiring additional support from Saxon for the XSLT part. It can work with scripts, behind a web service (RestXQ) etc.

If that specifically is your interest, it remains a BaseX question how best to do it. (My project was ten years ago now!)

If the question is more about how to run XSLT from the command line, the options mentioned are available - but also, we should not overlook, in this context, XProc 3.

An XProc 3.0/3.1 engine (such as XML Calabash or Morgana XProc IIIse) can execute and orchestrate processing pipelines applying either or both XQuery and XSLT to XML, and much more.

Regards, Wendell

XML Calabash: https://www.xmlcalabash.com/
Morgana XProc IIIse: https://www.xml-project.com/morganaxproc-iiise.html



On Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 6:58 AM Omar Siam <Omar.Siam@oeaw.ac.at> wrote:
Hi Rory,

BaseX is an _XQuery_ processor. It can call XSL processors usind the xslt module. But is _not_ an XSL processor itself.

Would it be an option for you to use an actual XSL processor for the task?
* XSL 2.0+ Saxon (https://www.saxonica.com/download/download_page.xml). Several language bindings are available nowadays.
* XSL 1.0 xsltproc (https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/xsltproc)

I can assure you this will be easier than getting basex to call an XSL processor for you and present you the results.

If you really want to use BaseX for that task you need to write a minimal XQuery snippet that calls xslt:transform or xslt:transfrom-text.

Am 22.07.2025 um 12:44 schrieb Rory Campbell-Lange: 
Hi -- beginner here.

I've installed basex via apt on Debian. 

ii  basex  10.5-1 all XML database and XPath/XQuery processor

I've successfully made and interrogated a database and made a few basic xquery commands from the command line.

I'm hoping to use basex for xsl transformations from the command line so that I can work rapidly on iterating towards the transformation I'm trying to achieve. Specifically, I'm aiming to transform an XML document using an XSL document to produce an HTML document. I've tried the following, plus other variants:

    basex -W -i input.xml -o out.html transform.xsl

However the resulting file at out.html is simply the transform.xsl file.

I'd be grateful for advice.

Many thanks,
Rory

Best regards

-- 
Mag. Ing. Omar Siam
Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften | Austrian Academy of Sciences
Stellvertretende Behindertenvertrauensperson | Deputy representative for disabled persons
Bäckerstraße 13, 1010 Wien, Österreich | Vienna, Austria
T: +43 1 51581-7295
omar.siam@oeaw.ac.at | www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh


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