xslt stylesheet to convert xml to tab delimited file

Sometimes, you just want a tab delimited text file. For those occasions, here's the xslt to convert an xml file to a tab delimited file. the tab and newline characters might get converted when displayed on the screen so do a view source if the select=" " shows whitespace <xsl:stylesheet version='1.0' xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes"/> <xsl:variable name="tab" select="' '" /> <xsl:variable name="newline" select="' '" /> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:apply-templates select="//player"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="player"> <xsl:value-of select="first_name"/> <xsl:value-of select="$tab" /> <xsl:value-of select="last_name"/> <xsl:value-of select="$newline" /> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>