XSLT-escape-sequence

sunilkswain · March 20th, 2009, 08:57 AM

My input xml/xmi file contains special characters like <&gt,space and " .When i am applying XSLT transform on it these as coming as it is or in some different format like &lt->&lt,&gt->&gt and &quote ->&#34.I need those to come as coresponding symbols like <,> or ".
For space i used normalise-space() for the same and it is ok.Give me some solution for other special symbols.
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Thanks in advance

Martin Honnen · March 20th, 2009, 09:11 AM

Please post a relevant sample of your XML input and show us the stylesheet you use and the output you get and the output you want to get.
Do you use XSLT 1.0 or 2.0?

mhkay · March 20th, 2009, 09:12 AM

If you want to output "<", then this is probably because you are generating markup rather than text. Remember that XSLT produces a result tree, which is then serialized. If you want markup in the serialized output, you need to generate nodes in the result tree, which you do using instructions such as xsl:element or xsl:comment. Don't try to produce lexical XML markup directly from your XSLT code, that's not how the language is designed to be used.

Perhaps from your description you're in the situation where the input document contains escaped markup, and you want the output to contain unescaped markup. Escaped markup is bad design, but it's used suprisingly often. One solution is to parse the input twice, by using an extension such as saxon:parse(). Another solution is to suppress the escaping of the output using disable-output-escaping="yes". But remember that isn't supported in all environments, it only works where the XML is being serialized, which means for example it doesn't work in Forefox.

Martin Honnen · March 20th, 2009, 09:36 AM

Well if you want XML output then the output will have to follow XML rules, meaning at least the less-than sign '<' needs to be escaped as '<'. And most serializers do escape the greater-than sign '>' as well.

Martin Honnen · March 20th, 2009, 09:38 AM

If you use XSLT 2.0 and you are sure you don't want well-formed XML output then look into character maps in XSLT 2.0: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#character-maps

sunilkswain · March 20th, 2009, 09:40 AM

As i m new to XSLT serialization could pls give more detail on this?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Honnen

Well if you want XML output then the output will have to follow XML rules, meaning at least the less-than sign '<' needs to be escaped as '<'. And most serializers do escape the greater-than sign '>' as well.

Martin Honnen · March 20th, 2009, 09:46 AM

You seem to use XSLT to transform XML to XML but complain about '<' being escaped as '<' in the result of the XSLT transformation while it has to be that way to have well-formed XML. There is not much you can do about that as long as you want to have XML output. If you don't want/need that then look into character maps, as already suggested.

sunilkswain · March 23rd, 2009, 03:03 AM

Thanks Mr Martin Honnen and others.
I got the solution through character-map .

Quote:

Originally Posted by Martin Honnen

You seem to use XSLT to transform XML to XML but complain about '<' being escaped as '<' in the result of the XSLT transformation while it has to be that way to have well-formed XML. There is not much you can do about that as long as you want to have XML output. If you don't want/need that then look into character maps, as already suggested.