Re: [xsl] string replacement for HTML tags

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel:

I agree with Joerg, with the following caveats:

* Keep in mind, as always, that relying on disable-output-escaping ties 
your process both to an XSLT engine that implements d-o-e, and to a 
particular processing model (the result tree must be serialized to a 
character stream for the transform to be complete). If you can live with 
that, cool.

* You're going to have to watch out for "real" bracket characters in your 
data ... they too will be converted to < and >. Short of fancy and 
error-prone heuristics, there is no way around this, since your problem 
itself violates the first principle of the markup paradigm on which XSLT is 
based, which might be phrased (with apologies to Kipling fans -- oops, I 
forget, there are no Kipling fans any more): "Data is data and markup is 
markup, and never the twain shall meet". (This would be true even if you 
did it the recursive way.)

* For the same reason, there's no way of assuring that the output you get 
will be well-formed XML until you already have it and are able to test it.

The same transform could be done as easily, or more so, with Perl or sed. 
(Indeed, better, since their support of regular expressions gives you at 
least some hope of working around any real brackets that might turn up.)

Cheers,
Wendell

At 04:34 PM 4/25/2002, Joerg wrote:
> Hello Daniel,
>
> I think this is a legitimate use case for disable-output-escaping.
>
> <xsl:template match="data">
>   <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes"
>       select="translate(., '[]', '&lt;&gt;')"/>
> </xsl:template>
>
> So with translate() you don't need a recursive approach.


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