when the source file has entity references and an xsl file has process it, these entities are converted to its actual character.
is there a way to preserve this? thanks.

No, there's no way to prevent this.

The workaround people sometimes use is to edit the file before transformation to replace all & characters by, say, ¶, and then edit the pilcrows back to ampersands after the transformation.

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

ok thanks.

i was going to used this approach but then again, it came to my mind that i actually need those entity reference because i am comaparing strings in my transformation. is there another way? or an application that can probably search and replace the entities? thanks.

Another possibility is to replace an entity reference &ent; with a construct such as

<?ent-start ent?>&ent;<?ent-end ent?>

If your transformation preserves the processing instructions, then a post-processing phase could reinstate the entity reference.

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

i see, thank you very much.

I've been fighting the same problem the last few days. I see your work-around is superior to mine. I've been trying to come up with all the pattern combinations to edit the output of the parser back.

Is there any point in suggesting a parser have the option to preserve entity references, rather than translating them? I am using Access to export a straightforward table as XML and using XSLT to do the final XML with attributes properly assigned to elements. Or is the problem that once the "value-of select..." result returns, the parsing is too far advanced to make this translation?

Harlan R. Cohen, MBA, CPIM