RE: Special Characters display incorrectly in XSL

> I am in a quandry regarding special characters.
>
> I grab data from a form and escape special characters using a simple
> escaping function on &, <, >, ', " and dynamically create an
> XML string.
>
> The problems are many fold...  (example is below)
>
> 1)  After the character is escaped and part of the XML, how
> do you display it correctly in XSL?

You can output it the same way as any other character, using <xsl:value-of>.
But note, XSLT does not display characters. It creates a result tree, and
optionally serializes this to an XML or HTML document. What the character
finally looks like on screen depends on the software you use to display the
output document, e.g. an editor or browser.
>
> 2)  When I display an escaped value in a form field such as an
> escaped-ampersand, it displays as the escaped code, &amp; not
> &.  How do I
> show just the & in the form field?

Don't use disable-output-escaping. It's almmost always a mistake, unless you
are generating something that isn't pure XML or HTML, e.g. an ASP page.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx


 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list