HTML formatted text via xsl templates?

beckfield · February 25th, 2005, 11:36 PM

In my .xml file, I have a string of text that looks like this:

<description>This is my <a href="http://www.kendietz.com>website</a>.</description>

In my xsl file, I have the following line:

    <xsl:apply-templates select="description" />

and the template is:

    <xsl:template match="description">
            <div id="description"><xsl:apply-templates /></div>
    </xsl:template>

The trouble is, the browser does not display the hyperlink, only the text. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any help.

joefawcett · February 26th, 2005, 08:04 AM

Within your description template you didn't ask the stylesheet to output anything, you just told it to apply-templates with no select attribute. This processes all children. If the a element doesn't have specific template then the default template is called which just outputs text, as you discovered.

To fix this you can just add a template that matches the a element:

Code:

<xsl:template match="a">
  <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>

As you need to output an exact copy of the a element then xsl:copy-of is the easiest option.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

beckfield · February 26th, 2005, 01:48 PM

Joe,

Thanks! That worked great. I have to admit, I'm having a really tough time getting a handle on the apply-templates concept. It seems really confusing to me.

Well, maybe this is a step toward figuring it out.

Thanks again!