Trouble with poundsign (Â£)

crazeydazey · June 12th, 2006, 03:41 AM

Hi,

I have a web app with text boxes allowing the user to enter comments, which then is saved into the database and returned as xml.

Because of the nature of the app it is very common for users to enter poundsigns.

I am then transforming this using XSL into HTML to be put through a PDF generator.

The poundsigns seem ok in XML, seem to handle ok in XSL and render in HTML [u]BUT</u> they render as Â£ not £

I have tried

Code:

<xsl:value-of select="translate($temp, 'Â£', '&amp;pound;' )" />

which obviously doesn't work.

and i have tried

Code:

    <xsl:call-template name="replaceCharsInString">
        <xsl:with-param name="stringIn" select="." />
        <xsl:with-param name="charsIn" select="'Â£'" />
        <xsl:with-param name="charsOut" select="$PoundString" />
    </xsl:call-template>    


<xsl:template name="replaceCharsInString">
    <xsl:param name="stringIn" />
    <xsl:param name="charsIn" />
    <xsl:param name="charsOut" />
    <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="contains($stringIn,$charsIn)">
            <xsl:value-of select="concat(substring-before($stringIn,$charsIn),$charsOut)" />
            <xsl:call-template name="replaceCharsInString">
                <xsl:with-param name="stringIn" select="substring-after($stringIn,$charsIn)" />
                <xsl:with-param name="charsIn" select="$charsIn" />
                <xsl:with-param name="charsOut" select="$charsOut" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
            <xsl:value-of select="$stringIn" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

Which also doesn't work

PLEASE HELP.. I'm on a tight deadline for this project to go live and at the moment we have question marks for poundsigns in our PDF..

Cheers

Darren

mhkay · June 12th, 2006, 03:57 AM

It looks as if there's some problem with the downstream application that's processing your XML output. By default your output will be encoded in UTF-8, perhaps the downstream application isn't decoding it correctly.

See what happens if you do

<xsl:output encoding="iso-8859-1"/>

or even

<xsl:output encoding="us-ascii"/>

The latter will force the character to be output as a character reference, for example &_#xa3; (without the underscore).

Note that &_pound; is recognized in HTML, but not in XML unless you declare it in your DTD.

There's little point, incidentally, in telling us your problem is urgent. In fact, I usually ignore posts marked as urgent because it often means the poster is panicking and won't take the time to think about the response before posting the next follow-up.

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

crazeydazey · June 12th, 2006, 04:20 AM

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the prompt reply (I was very impressed, I have your book sat at the side of me and it's been a huge help - Thanks)

But unfortunately I've tried changing the encoding already and still the HTML renders as Â£ instead of

Code:

&pound;

Oh also I forgot to mention before the PDF generator insists that the HTML for the poundsign must be

Code:

&pound;

, so I need to convert every instance of Â£ in a string with

Code:

&pound;

.

Cheers Again

Darren

mhkay · June 12th, 2006, 04:58 AM

>Oh also I forgot to mention before the PDF generator insists that the HTML for the poundsign must be

Code:

&pound;

, so I need to convert every instance of Â£ in a string with

Code:

&pound;

.

As I thought, a problem with the downstream application. It's got no business to make such a distinction.

What processor are you are using? You may be able to force output of £ using disable-output-escaping="yes". But it may be easier to post-process the generated HTML using a text editor or a Perl script.

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

crazeydazey · June 12th, 2006, 05:56 AM

>it may be easier to post-process the generated HTML using a text editor or a Perl script.

excellent Idea, the transform is done through VB.net, I can find and replace the Â£'s.

Brilliant

Thanks you...