Re: Converting an xml file into an excel file using XSLT

[Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

> I am trying to convert an xml file into an excel file using XSLT.
> 
> The error returned by the parser is not helpful. Also, I am sure that
> the tab(\t) and \0 used are incorrect. I don't know their character
> values(entity).

First realize that an XSLT stylesheet is an XML document. Only certain
characters are allowed to exist in an XML document. See the XML 1.0
Recommendation for details.

You can put a tab character (U+0009) in an XML document -- either put the
literal tab character, or a character reference: 	 or 	 But you
cannot put a null character (U+0000) in an XML document.

So there is no way to put a disallowed character anywhere in the result
tree, because it can't go in the source document or stylesheet. Although
in theory, the trees do not have to be derived from well-formed XML
documents, so I wonder if this is always true.

The "text", "html", and "xml" output methods, as specified by the XSLT 1.0
Recommendation, do not have any provisions for changing any of the result
tree's character data to disallowed characters, which is as it should be.
You would need an XSLT processor with a custom output method to produce
the results you want directly.

If I were you, I would just approximate by outputting the 2 characters
"\0" (slash and then zero, or some other unambiguous string), and run it
through a post-processor of your own design.

   - Mike
___________________________________________________________
Mike J. Brown, software engineer, Webb Interactive Services
XML/XSL stuff: http://www.skew.org/    http://www.webb.net/


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