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Re: CDATA headache

• From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
• To: michael odling-smee <mike.odlingsmee@gmail.com>
• Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:12:43 +0200

* michael odling-smee wrote:
>Now I am well aware that these are entirely equivalent from an XML
>standpoint - however the customer point of view is if they are equivalent
>why has the parser altered the way the characters are escaped? On this front
>it is unlikely that links to sites such as
>http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/cdata.html#d3164e447 will be enough to
>convince them that our processor is behaving correctly - they need a formal
>specification. I have searched the XML specification (to no avail) and was
>wondering whether anyone could point me to the relevant place which
>specifies that this is expected behaviour of the parser/xslt processor.

As far as XSLT 1.0 output goes this is covered by the XPath 1.0 data
model defined http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#data-model in which there are
no CDATA sections; without proprietary extensions the difference be-
tween the two forms cannot be represented and thus not retained. You
can use the cdata-section-elements attribute of the xsl:output element
to have the serializer add such sections to elements with certain names.

This is the result of simplification, more work is required to retain
the insignificant differences, just like you do not usually treat the
difference between example='value' and example="value" or the difference
between example='ö', example='ö', and example='ö' as something
worth retaining. To retain the differences you could, for example, pre-
process the documents, replacing CDATA sections with e.g. elements, and
then transform the elements back into CDATA sections later on.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ 

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: CDATA headache
    • From: michael odling-smee <mike.odlingsmee@gmail.com>

• References:
  • CDATA headache
    • From: michael odling-smee <mike.odlingsmee@gmail.com>