Re: Preserve HTML formatting when apply-templates in

This raises an issue I've been struggling with as well. I've been reading this
list for several years now and have seen numerous threads about avoiding
d-o-e if at all possible. I've almost always been able to avoid it, and I've
even  rooted out as much of it as I can from the code I've corrected for
others. But I've just used it in my current project, and I'm not sure if there
was another approach I could have used.

Here's the situation: I've got a very large input file which would overflow my
memory if I ran the XSLT all at once. So instead I'm breaking up the file into
smaller pieces and running each one separately. More specifically, the file
is set up like

and I need to process the header, each individual bill, and finally the trailer
in a series of XSLT transforms, usually more than a thousand all told.
However, I do need to retain some of the data from the transforms as I go
because I need to include a grand total of the amount billed and the total
number of records in the trailer data.

<xalan:write file="bills.xml">
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="true">&lt;root&gt;</xsl:text>
</xalan:write>

      <xalan:write file="bills.xml" append="true">
            <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;/root&gt;</xsl:text>
      </xalan:write>

> Can you think of a sensible use of "disable-output-escaping"?

4 off the top of my head:

a)
creating almost-but-not-quite XML like some template languages

<% .... %>

(ASP JSP etc)

As that isn't legal XML, XSLT won't generate it without a bit of from
d-o-e.

b)
Generating a local subset of a doctype, and entity references, if you
_really_ have to.

c)
In the MathML specification we use CDATA sections for mathml examples.
We don't just "inline" the XML which is the usual advice as we want
tight control over things like indentation and use of ' or " around
attribute values. If you are telling the user that they can do a="2" or
a='2' you don't want the system to write them both out the same way:-)
In the normative  html version of the spec it's no problem you just
value-of the example into a <pre> and it all works, but  in the
XHTML+MathML version we _also_ want to inline it as XML so you get a
side-by-side view of the literal XML and how your browser renders it,
we use d-o-e to produce this.

d) If you have quoted html inside your xml as in
 <foo><![CDATA[ a <br> c <img src= "x.png"> jjj ]]></foo>
and you need that html in the output. If you can fix your input not to
do that it is good but often you can't (RSS feeds etc) and so d-o-e can
be used as a method of last resort (although xslt2 offers alternatives,
more on that another day perhaps:-)(

David

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Chris Loschen
closchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
781-718-3017 (cell)