Yep, hours after I posted my initial inquiry, I had finally figured that out. . . so I continued testing with xslt_process, and have still encountered problems...and again I think it's the problem of where everyone in the www is copy-and-pasting the same script. So I can only find the methods I'm unsuccessfully using, and neither Sablotron or PHP.net have any hints...
Ah, but I finally figured everything out just now! Agh! In case any other TCHers are curious, here's what finally worked for me:
<?php
// Initiate the Sablotron XSLT handler
$hXSLT = xslt_create();
// Pass XML and XSL data as strings into an array
$aArguments = array(
'sXML' => file_get_contents("transform.xml"),
'sXSL' => file_get_contents("transform.xsl"));
// Pass xslt_process the transform handler, the xml and xsl strings (as arguments),
// the $sTransformResult container string, and the $aArguments array
$sTransformResult = xslt_process($hXSLT, 'arg:sXML', 'arg:sXSL', NULL, $aArguments);
// Print out the transformed data
echo $sTransformResult;
// Free up the XSLT handler resource
xslt_free($hXSLT);
?>
On http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.xslt-process.php they list 4 examples, but with current versions of PHP only examples 3 and 4 are correct. xslt_process can no longer accept the filenames of your xml and xslt files as arguments; you first have to set them to strings. AND you can't merely pass the strings to the function; you must set them into arrays, and pass both the array ($aArguments) and it's pair indices ('arg:sXML' and 'arg:sXSL'). The NULL is where $sTransformResult COULD go if you were to just call the function without passing the results to a string, but this doesn't work either.
Boy that was a struggle to get to the solution! But the benefits are great -- instead of echoing the results to the screen, I can save them down as a static (X)HTML file.
Thanks for the warm welcome to the family! You guys are the best. . .
-John
