Re: string replacement for HTML tags

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Subject: Re: string replacement for HTML tags
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:28:41 -0400

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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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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Current Thread

string replacement for HTML tags
- Daniel Fisher - Thu, 25 Apr 2002 12:59:10 -0400 (EDT)
  - Joerg Heinicke - Thu, 25 Apr 2002 16:29:22 -0400 (EDT)
    - Wendell Piez - Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:25:10 -0400 (EDT) <=
    - David Carlisle - Thu, 25 Apr 2002 18:07:19 -0400 (EDT)
      - Joerg Heinicke - Thu, 25 Apr 2002 18:53:42 -0400 (EDT)
      - Michael Kay - Fri, 26 Apr 2002 03:45:57 -0400 (EDT)
      - David Carlisle - Fri, 26 Apr 2002 04:19:23 -0400 (EDT)

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