Re: Xoath quote escaping

       // returns either a double-quoted string or an XPath
       // concat expression with double quotes single-quoted.
       //
 var arr = str.split('"');
       var arr2 = new Array();
 for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
           if (arr[i]) {
               arr2.push('"' + arr[i] + '"');
               if (i < arr.length-1) {
                   arr2.push("'\"'");
               }
           } else {
               if (i < arr.length - 1) {
                   arr2.push("'\"'");
               }
           }
    }
 if (arr.length == 1) {
  return arr[0];
 } else {
  return  'concat(' + arr2.join(",") + ")";
 }
}

In XPath 1.0, without variables, you're basically stuck with the XPath
expression

concat("This is some ", '"', "quoted", '"', " content of Ted's")

and then of course you have to backslash-escape the quotes to get them
through Javascript.

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Duane Hitz [mailto:dhitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 28 April 2007 15:27
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:  Xoath quote escaping

All,

I have a situation where I am building an XPath expression in
JavaScript to select nodes from an XML document.  The content
of the nodes could contain double quotes, single quotes or
both at the same time.  It is user-entered data, so I have no
control ultimately over what the content contains.

The content might be (brackets excluded): [This is some
"quoted" content of Ted's]

The dynamically built xpath expression might look like (where
subNodeValue is the above content):

1) "//node[" + subNodeName + " = '" + subNodeValue + "']"

... except for the single quote problem... or:

2) "//node[" + subNodeName + " = \"" + subNodeValue + "\"]"

... except for the double quote problem... or even:

3) "//node[" + subNodeName + " = "" + subNodeValue + ""]"

...except that this just doesn't work.

Any thoughts on how to make this work? Is it possible?

I've read everything I can find on quote escaping (on this list and
elsewhere) and there doesn't appear to be a solution that
covers this case (I know XPath 2 is supposed to allow ""
escaping - unfortunately, we're stuck on IE6+ & MSXML3).

We are dynamically displaying rows in a table that meet the
xpath criteria... setting a @showing attribute and then
re-transforming... so it really has to be in JavaScript.

One option would be to replace (s/"/'/g or s/"/''/g) all
double quotes on the server side when building the XML - and
then use option 2 above.  I don't really want to change
user-entered data. It is, sadly, what I've come down to.  I'm
hoping there's a more elegant solution to this.

Thanks for any help...

Duane