RE: 'Problems getting '&' output instead of '&'.

[ Edward L. Knoll]

> I have a XSL stylesheet which is generating HTML targeted at 
> a old server which apparently does not recognize '&', 
> because we're having problems getting  parameters passes to a 
> servlet and the only thing we've been able to come up with 
> seems to be that we have '&' in the URL instead of '&'.  
> I've been though several of the old threads related to 
> disable-output-escaping and issues with ampersand and have 
> yet to find something that works.
> 

"&" in a url is correct when the url is the value of an attribute.
Most html browsers however tolerate a plain "&" there, even though it is
not correct (since it is a common mistake).  

However, "&" is not correct when the url is actually used to find a
network address.  The browser takes care of converting the entity to the
actual character value (which in this case is "&").  So your server
should not be seeing any "&" entities in requests.

So there should not be any need to escape the "&" in your output,
but perhaps you are doing something that would better be done in some
other way.  Could you explain more about the problem you say your server
is encountering?

> I suspect my initial problem is that I have variables which 
> represent common content which is output multiple times 
> during processing.  Part of this common content are these 
> URLs.  Given what I've read, the reason I'm not successful in 
> the 'disable-output-escaping' is because the variable 
> represents a results-tree-fragment and the 
> disable-output-escaping won't work unless I was "serializing 
> to output". 

See, you cannot have a bare "&" in the xml or html anywhere, whether in
the source, the stylesheet, or the output (unless it is text output).
Internally, the processor stores "&" in place of "&", so all the
strings are stored as intended and it is just a matter of getting the
output you intend to get.

Cheers,

Tom P

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