Using XSLT in a concise way to modify XML elements

I have the xml file that I totally didn’t get from somewhere else

<bookstore>
  <book genre="autobiography" publicationdate="1981" ISBN="1-861003-11-0">
    <title>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title>
    <author>
      <first-name>Benjamin</first-name>
      <last-name>Franklin</last-name>
    </author>
    <price>8.99</price>
  </book>
  <book genre="novel" publicationdate="1967" ISBN="0-201-63361-2">
    <title>The Confidence Man</title>
    <author>
      <first-name>Herman</first-name>
      <last-name>Melville</last-name>
    </author>
    <price>11.99</price>
  </book>
  <book genre="philosophy" publicationdate="1991" ISBN="1-861001-57-6">
    <title>The Gorgias</title>
    <author>
      <name>Plato</name>
    </author>
    <price>9.99</price>
  </book>
</bookstore>

As a test, I want to modify all the prices to the nonsense "i win"

And so I wrote the following XSLT file

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

    <xsl:template match = "/bookstore/book/price">
        <price>i win</price>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I then use the following vb.net code to parse it

Module Module1

    Sub Main()
        Dim xslt = New XslCompiledTransform
        dim curDir = My.Computer.FileSystem.CurrentDirectory
        xslt.Load(curDir & "\testtransform.xsl")
        xslt.Transform(curDir & "\testinv2.xml",curDir & "\outinv.xml")
    End Sub

End Module

When I ran this, outinv.xml contained the following

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
  
    The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
    
      Benjamin
      Franklin
    
    <price>i win</price>
  
  
    The Confidence Man
    
      Herman
      Melville
    
    <price>i win</price>
  
  
    The Gorgias
    
      Plato
    
    <price>i win</price>

So essentially it thanos snapped all the tags that weren’t those specific price tags, which I think makes sense. My question is whether there is a way through xslt to modify those tags and keep everything else the same, without having to make templates for every single possible tag that I expect. Thanks

>Solution :

In XSLT 3 you can declare <xsl:mode on-no-match="shallow-copy"/>. You would need to use Saxon for XSLT 3, Microsoft doesn’t support it.

For an XSLT 1.0 processor you would need to add "the identity transformation template" to your code:

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