I have created some XSLT pages which display (amongst other things) tabular, numeric data.

Now (as usual) the users have asked how they can export to Excel (It's always the same story: Rather then request the right reports, they want to mess around themselves).

Anyway, my question is whether there is a way to get an XSLT stylesheet (working without Webserver support) to export a formatted file (e.g. csv or tab-delim)?

Any tips on such an option or stories of how others have dealt with similar user-requests would be a great help.

Many thanks,
Alan Searle.

Yes, it's perfectly possible to output a CSV using XSLT. It can be a bit tricky to get all the quoting of special characters like quotes right, partly because there's no spec for CSVs, but apart from that it's straightforward. Use output method="text", and take care over whitespace: don't output any literal text except using <xsl:text>.

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