newbie help

briforge · September 6th, 2005, 11:18 AM

I am inheriting support for an app that has XSLT in it, and I have not yet had any XSLT experience or training. I'm trying to do "a quick fix" and have been fumbling around. I've been introduced to the XSLT document but understand very little of the constructs and language.

I need to insert a new line character into the output of our XSLT, which is another XML document. I've tried inserting it via the code below but it's not working. I just changed it to add the '\n' character (I'm a Java developer), the larger structure with the variable and 'value-of's were already there.

I did some searching for this and found one site that suggested doing

Code:

<xsl:text>#xa;</xsl:text>

to output a newline character, but I don't know how to integrate that into the 'xsl:value-of' code below, which appears to be used to build a the comments variable.

What they're doing is dumping a bunch of excess data into this 'Comments' field, which is displayed in a <textArea> at some point, and they want it formatted better, with new lines for each new data field that was dumped into this Comments area. I know it sounds stupid; there are many kludgy, stupid requirements about this project it's driving me crazy.

Code:

<xsl:variable name="CommentsVar">
    <xsl:value-of select="'Reported by the agent..'"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="'\n'"/>

I'd appreciate any help. Thanks

joefawcett · September 6th, 2005, 11:27 AM

It depends somewhat on where you are trying to put a newline but

Code:

<xsl:value-of select="'Reported by the agent..#xa;'"/>

or

Code:

]<xsl:value-of select="'Reported by the agent..#xd;'"/>

may work.

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

briforge · September 6th, 2005, 12:24 PM

Thanks for your reply. What is the difference between the '#xa' and '#xd'?

briforge · September 6th, 2005, 01:52 PM

I've tried both of these strings, the '#xd;' and '#xa;'. They both came through as that on the XML instead of a new line. I mean I saw the same string ('#xd;') in the output XML, and it didn't appear to render as a new line. Is that what was supposed to happen?

joefawcett · September 7th, 2005, 01:53 AM

My post ran foul of the forum parser. The two entities are (without the dashes for real use:

Code:

&-#-x-a; (carriage return)
&-#-x-d; (new line)

If I understand correctly an XML parser automatically converts all continuous combinations of these to a single new line character whilst parsing so either one should work. If your output is HTML though neither will work as HTML needs

Code:

<br>

--

Joe (Microsoft MVP - XML)

mhkay · September 7th, 2005, 07:49 AM

Not quite correct - xA is newline (line feed), xD is carriage return. An XML parser turns *real* carriage returns or CRLF pairs into single newlines, but not CRs or LFs written as entity references.

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