Re: & converted to &

Hai Hong Ling,

> In my XSLT file, I want to convert a code to a description. The
> description somehow might contains &, < and > symbols. The
> description will display as a plaintext. In my XSL file, I set
>
> <xsl:when test=" code='13' ">AI &#38; </xsl:when>
> <xsl:when test=" code='14' ">&#163;</xsl:when>

When the XML parser parses the XSLT stylesheet, it creates a tree that
looks like:

  xsl:when ----- test: code='13'
    +- "AI & "
  xsl:when ----- test: code='14'
    +- "£"

As far as XSLT is concerned, there is absolutely no difference between
using '&#38;' in your stylesheet and using '&amp;' in your stylesheet
-- they are both decoded into the character '&'.

When you serialise that as XML, the & character has to be escaped
because the & is a significant character in XML (it marks the start of
an entity reference or character reference). The built-in escape for
the & character is '&amp;', so that's the one that most processors use
to serialise & characters.

If you're generating plain text rather than XML, then you should set
the output method to text using the xsl:output element:

<xsl:output method="text" />

That way the processor won't do any escaping (there are no special
characters in plain text), and you'll get the characters '&' and '£'
in your output.

If you want to generate XML, but have more control over how the result
tree is serialised, then put the result of the transforming into a DOM
and write your own processor to serialise that DOM as an XML document.

By the way, the reason that your browser is displaying '&' and '£', as
it should, is that it knows that the entity reference '&amp;' means
the character '&', so that's what it displays.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/


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