RE: translate for partial uri-encoding?

There is no trick. You either write the code yourself, which you seem to be
unwilling to do, or you invoke a library routine that does it, which you
also seem unwilling to do.

XPath 2.0 offers an encode-uri() function as standard, I suggest that if you
are short of time you should use it.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Greif [mailto:jgreif@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 09 September 2004 05:03
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  translate for partial uri-encoding?
> 
> Suppose I have this input document
> 
> <company>JOE'S PAINT &amp; BODY<company>
> 
> and I'm trying to insert the element's text in the query 
> string of a URI in
> a result document, doing something like this
> 
> <xsl:template match="/">
>    <someURL>
>        <xsl:text>xsl:text>http://foo.com/?X=1&amp;CO=</xsl:text>
>        <xsl:value-of select="translate(/company, ' ', '+')"/>
>     </someURL>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> The result document should look like:
> <someURL>http://foo.com/?X=1&amp;CO=JOE%27S+PAINT+%26+BODY</someURL>
> 
> The translate function arguments above are insufficient to correctly
> url-encode the text of the input <company> node given above 
> (as written, it
> only converts space to +).  The proof-of-concept demo I'm 
> producing in a
> very limited time will run on an XSLT platform that does not 
> support *any*
> extensions (such as the EXSLT str:encode-uri), so I'm trying 
> to get by with
> xsl:translate.  For this demo, I have some control over what 
> input will
> actually be passed, but must at least appear to have some 
> idea of what I'm
> doing for common cases with unsafe characters.
> 
> What is the trick for including the ampersand and apostrophe 
> characters in
> the 2nd argument of the translate function and their encoded 
> equivalents in
> UTF-8 (e.g. %26 for the ampersand) in the third argument of 
> translate?  I'm
> not ambitious enough to attempt to handle all the unsafe 
> characters that can
> occur in all possible character encodings, or even all such 
> characters in
> one encoding.
> 
> Jeff