Re: [xsl] > replaced by ">", < is not replaced...

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jethro Borsje wrote:
> With 'removed' I mean: "replaced by the actual character". So " " 
> becomes a " " (SPACE)

no, it becomes a NBSP (which is binary encoded as x00A0 in UTF-16, or 
xA0 in ISO-8859-1), it looks like a space, but is not. If your processor 
or serializer makes the character a space (i.e., binary encoded as x0020 
in UTF-16 or x20 in ISO-8859-1, UTF-8 and many other US-ASCII compatible 
encodings) then it is a bug with your serialization software and you 
should file it with the makers.

> in the output, ">" become a ">". This is not what I want. Not 
> because of visualization in an HTML client, but because I have to be 
> able to map the output of the XLS back to some original input which 
> contains the ">", " ", etc. I basically just want to keep the 
> character encodings from the input in the output.

Aha, now we're getting at the root of the problem. You need to compare 
the things. If you compare XML documents, or HTML documents, the 
comparison software should be able to deal with numerical character 
entities (and named character entities) and treat a ">" equal to ">" 
equal to ">" equal to "&#062".

If your software cannot make that kind of comparison, you can try 
several things, of which the following come to mind:

  1. Post process the output to get your original char ents back
  2. Use XSLT 2 instead and use character maps to force the char ents
  3. Use different comparison software that is capable of reading XML 
the proper way (you mention HTML, but from your code it seems that you 
create XML)
  4. Load and Save the original XML into the XSLT processor you built, 
one with transformation, other with copy-of, this will serialize both 
the same way and makes comparison on a byte by byte basis easier (but 
still not solid)
  5. Use XSLT to do the comparison (XSLT 2 is preferred: just use 
deep-equal() function if equality is all you are after)

I cannot recommend anything else than option 3 and 5, all others are 
workarounds that after time will make your software weak or at least 
vulnerable to bugs.

HTH,

Cheers,
-- Abel Braaksma