Xalan Vs. Output Escaping

Hello fellow intrepid XSL adventurers,

My team was recently quite aggravated by a possible bug (or feature?) in Xalan's output escaping. We were using output encoding="html", and the values we were comparing were "&" and "%3A". We were seeing unanticipated results among the various methods of getting a value.

Let's watch the translation of characters in Xalan (doe = disable-output-escaping):


XML Source        :  ..... & ....... & ....... %3A .....
value-of doe="no" :  ..... & ... & ... %3A .....
value-of doe="yes":  ..... & ....... & ....... %3A .....
curly braces {}   :  ..... & ....... & ....... %253A ...


According to this, doesn't it seem that using curly braces should give us the same value as either of the value-of methods? Why are the curly braces give a totally different value for the "%3A" value? Am I missing something here about the behavior of curly braces, or is there a bug in Xalan that I was unaware of? Hopefully this will also help other people using Xalan, as well.

I appreciate your insight,

...Matt


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