You're talking about "tags". Tags don't exist in the data manipulated by
XSLT. XSLT only manipulates nodes in a tree. The way to solve your problem
is to use XSLT the way it was designed to be used: forget about CDATA and
tags, and think about element nodes.

Now take a step back, and tell us what you actually want to achieve - that
is, the input and output of your transformation, rather than your incorrect
attempts at coding the solution.

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Anirvan Majumdar [mailto:anirban.majumdar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 07 August 2008 09:38
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  Escaping <xsl:element> ouput
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have a <xsl:variable> element which contains HTML snippet. 
> Parts of this snippet are generated by transformations of 
> other XSLT elements present.
> Next on, I'd like to take this <xsl:variable>'s value and 
> apply some string manipulation templates on it. I realized 
> that if I wanted to extract the value inclusive of tags then 
> I needed to include the HTML code, and not the XSLT code, 
> within <![CDATA]]> sections. Everything seemed to be going 
> fine until I realized that all the content generated through 
> the <xsl:element>s was missing. The tags are ignored and only 
> the node value is captured.
> 
> How can I get around this problem? I checked and there is no 
> way for output escaping in <xsl:element>, and neither is 
> there any point of putting the code within <[CDATA[]]> since 
> the transformations won't occure only.
> 
> I also thought of using <xsl:copy-of> to extract the variable 
> value, but this isn't of much use to me, since the data 
> extracted through copy-of cannot be used for any further 
> processing as such. I can only display this value [something 
> like <xsl:value-of>]
> 
> Here's an example of the kind of XSL I'm working on:
> <xsl:variable name="someVar">
>    <![CDATA[
>    <span id="1">
>       <input type="text" value="A" name="txtVal"/>
>       ]]>
>       <xsl:element name="input">
>          <xsl:attribute name="type">hidden<xsl:attribute>
>          <xsl:attribute name="value">[some value computed 
> before]</xsl:attribute>
>       </xsl:elelement>
>    <![CDATA[
>    </span>
>    ]]>
> </xsl:variable>