Re: [xsl] (Re-)Escaping entities in input text

Subject: Re: [xsl] (Re-)Escaping entities in input text
From: "Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:21:18 +0100
> Of course, there is the possibility of replacing all 5 entities "by hand" by calling a transform function, however this might not be very efficient when the string is getting big. Is there either:

_never_ do that... it's the first step down the wrong road which is
long and painful.

> - a way of disabling entity interpretation with xsl:value-of (actually getting "<" when it's written like this in the input file)

xsl:value-of simply creates text nodes in the result tree, there is no
interpretation going on - that only happens during
parsing/serialisation

> - a function to "reescape" a piece of text so that it's usable in an XML file/string?

that happens during serialisation... for example:

<foo> a &lt; b </foo>

when that's parsed you will get a node "foo" with a single text node
child "a < b".   If you do xsl:value-of on that text node, it will add
to the result tree.  It's still "a < b" at this point.  Then the
serializer operates on the result tree which knows that "<" in a text
node must be escaped, so after that step it becomes "a &lt; b"...

It sounds like you might be skipping the serialization step - perhaps
you're constructing a String and just writing that to disk?  eg

String xml = "<foo>" + someValue = "</foo>";

...which would give you:

<foo> a < b </foo>.

...hence the question?  Doing it that way is A Bad Thing - the golden
rule is to always read and write XML using proper XML readers and
writers.

-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/

Current Thread