Re: [xsl] amp symbols

[Chad Chelius <cchelius@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The vendor that I am submitting these XML files to requires entities  
because there are math equations and similar items that can't be  
represented using ASCII. In the layout application, we use a special  
font to generate these items. So whenever they are used within the  
content of the file, we need to change them to the appropriate  
entity. That being said, is there a better way other than manually  
going through my XML file and changing those characters to their  
correct entity code?

chad

On Jul 3, 2006, at 9:21 AM, David Carlisle wrote:

> I maintain a DTD that has perhaps more character entities than any  
> other
> "public" DTD (MathML has more than 2000 entities for characters) but
> still, I question whether there is ever a need to have such a  
> character
> reference in generated files (such as the output of xslt). Entities  
> for
> characters are really there to ease hand authoring.
>
> If people said they needed attributes to be marked up using ' instead
> of " then you would be in a simialr position, the XSLT spec gives no
> control over this, so you have the option of
>
> a) educate your users that XML does not distinguish between these  
> markup
>    forms, so they should not either.
>
> or, if your users are unwilling to be educated, or in a position of
> power, such they may choose not to listen, or if you just want to be
> kind to them anyway,
>
> b) post process the XSLT output with a NON-XML tool such as perl or  
> sed
> to edit the markup appropriately.
>
>
> XSLT1 does give disable-output-escaping that can be used sometimes  
> as an
> alternative to (b) but it's not usually a good idea, and expplictly an
> optional feature in XSLt1 and explictly deprecated in XSLT2. If you
> really must do something like this, and can use XSLT2, character maps
> provide a much better mechanism architecturally.