I'm in a situation of using an identity template to take everything in my XML file by default, except for a couple of things that I choose not to copy. That part works for simple leaf elements.

But what if the element has children, and I want to keep the children? In other words:

<A>
 <B>
   <C>Foo</C>
 </B>
 <B>
   <C>Bar</C>
 </B>
</A>

What's the trick for leaving out B, and just producing:

<A>
 <C>Foo</C>
 <C>Bar</C>
</A>

I tried matching a template on //B/* and then just using a copy-of ".", but that didn't work.

Add the template rule

<xsl:template match="B">
  <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference