Hi all,

I'm new to the forum, but came accross it though google, after checking it out it seems to be a really good source of info, so hopefully I'll become a bit more of an active member around here!

Im currently strting on converting alot of content to prepare it for an import into a cms system we use but am encountering a bit of a problem in doing so.

The content is in XML (of mixed format/standard) but i have to produce a new xml structure that the new cms will accept. What I would like to do is insert a section of an xml document (including tags) into a CDATA section in the final document, for example;

<content>
<p> ...data... </p>
<p> ...data... </p>
<p><a href="" title="">...</a></p>
</content>

Would be transformed into;
<content>
<![CDATA[
<p> ...data... </p>
<p> ...data... </p>
<p><a href="" title="">...</a></p>
]]>
</content>

After playing with something which im sure must be easy i just can't seem to figure it out, so any help would be massively appreciated.
Im using PHP to perform the transformation if that helps

Many thanks indeed

/Matt

You can't have tags inside a CDATA section. The whole purpose of CDATA is to tell the system that things that might look like tags aren't tags really. So you really need to review your design.

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

This is one of those cases where you might have to resort to using disable-output-escaping. It's not a nice feature, not all processors support it, and it only works if you are serializing the output. But it allows you to do:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;![CDATA[</xsl:text>
<xsl:copy-of select="....."/>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">]]&gt;</xsl:text>

It's often handy feature if you need to do "dirty" programming like this.

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

mhkay, thanks a lot for your reply it has sorted the problem for me.

I agree totally that the way the system is working at the moment is far from ideal, unfortunately the CMS system they are using forces this hand though, and means that what is actually xml markup is being stored as a string, making it much harder to then perform future transformations on.

I had actually tried the method you showed me, but i have failed to grasp the proper function of the disable-output-escaping

Once again, thanks a lot for the help, its greatly appreciated!

/Matt