RE: [xsl] character entities

["Edward Bryant" <bryant_edward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> The & represents an ampersand; it's seen within the XSLT stylesheet as 
> a single character (for example, string-length() is 1); but if you 
> serialize the result as XML or HTML then it will be >output as & 
> because that's how an ampersand is represented in XML and HTML.

I get that the "&" is the unicode for an ampersand, but what do you mean 
by "serialize" ?

So, if a character reference is in an XML source file it will show up as a 
reference in an XHTML output file (I got the impression from other posts 
that the XSLT would change the reference into the actual character)?

> You can't create character references in an XSLT template.

So what is the accepted way to add character references to the output? Would 
I have to run some kind of find-and-replace script after the XSLT 
transformation? What do other people do?

I came across "xmlchar" at XML.com. I didn't what to use it, but it changes 
an element into a character reference. Looking at their stylesheets, I don't 
understand how that works but my attempt to change <quote></quote> into the 
#8220 and #8221 entities won't?

> That's not the output of the stylesheet (or even of the serializer): that's 
> the output of the software that you're using to display the output of the 
> serializer on your screen.

Sorry, I am an idiot, if I would have checked the XHTML output in notepad I 
would have noticed that.