Hey everybody

I want to prevent my stylesheets from generating entities for foreign (i.e. non-ascii) characters in the serialized result-tree. I'm using the HTML output method of XSL 1.0/1.1, and it always converts my special characters (such as German umlauts & Cyrillic characters) to entities.
All the XML-files use UTF-8 as encoding, and that's also what I specify in the <xsl:output> tag, but still those entities appear.

I know I could prevent this behaviour by using the "disable-output-escaping" attribute, but this would mean changing a lot of files, which would mean a lot of (extra) work.

Using the XML output method is another way of preventing this (I've tested), but then the generated HTML-files are not rendered correctly in some browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer).

At the moment, upgrading to XSL 2.0 is also out-of-the-question, because of time-constraints and I'm not sure that would do me any good.

Is there another way of forcing XSL not to generate entities? I've been searching the Web for the past week, and all I can find are question of people who actually want to have those entities in their result [:-(]

Thanks in advance

Rolf

Technically they aren't entities, they are either entity references or character references. For example, & nbsp; is an entity reference, while & #xa0; is a character reference.

XSLT 1.0 gives the serializer free range on this: it can do what it likes, so long as the serialized form is an accurate representation of what is in the result tree. Your particular product might give you more control (Saxon 6.x does, for example, though an extension attribute in xsl:output called saxon:character-representation).

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

Thank you Mr. Kay!

I knew there had to be a way, and I knew you would have the answer :-) We have always been very satisfied with Saxon, and once again it proved to be the right choice.

Greetz

Rolf