Hi,

 I am trying to add a CDATA section to output and also inside the CDATA section i need to put the node set in the current context. I gave cdata-section-elements in the xsl:output element. Basically i would like to do this -

 <xsl:output method="xml" cdata-section-elements="sampleElm" />
 <xsl:template match="/">
    <sampleElm><![CDATA[<xsl:copy-of select="."]]></sampleElm>
 </xsl:template>

 As you all see, which will not work. Is there a way to do this?

Thank You in advance,
Sudhish

CDATA means "character data". The purpose of CDATA is to say "anything in here is pure text, even if it looks like markup". Therefore, CDATA cannot contain element nodes, by definition.

If you write

<![CDATA[<xsl:copy-of select="."]]>

in a stylesheet, it is equivalent to writing

&lt;xsl:copy-of select="."

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

Michael,

  Absolutely. I agree with you.. But my requirement is to pass an xml inside xml and as per my understanding, the only choice is to put it inside a CDATA element. I was looking for a way to instruct the processor to read a variable or copy a node set.

Thanks,
sudhish

In the XSLT/XPath data model there is no such thing as a CDATA node. The serializer can represent a text node as a CDATA section in the output, but it can't wrap CDATA delimiters around other kinds of node. If you need to generate this kind of structure (and sadly, people who don't understand XML very well often do design such things), then you'll have to step outside the language. One way to do it is to use an extension function such as saxon:serialize() to convert your inner document to a string of lexical XML, and then output this string as a text node using cdata-section-elements to wrap the CDATA delimiters around it. Another way is to generate the CDATA delimiters using disable-output-escaping (or in 2.0 using character maps). It's all a bit dirty - a consequence of poor XML design.

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