RE: Fwd: Parsing Entities

> I have an XML document that has some XML mark-up that is stored as
> entities so I have something like:
> 
> <letter_text>&lt;p&gt;Some random letter text 
> :(.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Will this work?&lt;/p&gt;</letter_text>

Well, to be pedantic, it isn't markup; the only reason it's been entitized
is to tell the world that it isn't markup; but we know what you mean.
> 
> Now the encoded data should be valid XHTML fragments (though if I was
> parsing it as a root node I would expect there would be multiple roots
> causing issues) which I would like to use as XHTML in my result
> document.
> 
> I've looked at saxon:parse
> (http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/extensions/functions/pa
> rse.html)
> though that seems specific to CDATA and expects a single root node XML
> document.
> 

saxon:parse will do the job just fine. You need to wrap it in an element to
make it well-formed:

select="saxon:parse(concat('&lt;e&gt;', letter_text,
'&lt;/e&gt;'))/e/child::node()"

should do the trick.

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