Re: [xsl] Passing through character entities intact

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Angus,

At 03:59 PM 10/10/01, you wrote:
>How do you take a character entity in an input document and pass it through
>to the output document as an entity(i.e. without any change)?
>
>What I am seeing is that the character entity gets substituted with the
>character code for the entity instead of passing the entity through as a
>character entity.

Yes, this is normal. In general, the processing model for XSLT -- which 
entails a complete parse, including entity resolution, before the processor 
(logically speaking) "sees" the document -- makes it impossible to do what 
you want. Once the document is parsed, the stylesheet processor can't know 
what was once an entity, and what not.

Accordingly, the usual fix is to pre-process the entities into something 
that won't be parsed (some pseudo-entity format such as "%#%mdash;" for 
—), and then post-process to reverse this.

But recently, Zarella Rendon posted a nice alternative workaround to the 
problem, particularly good if you've got lots of data. See 
http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200110/msg00115.html.

Cheers,
Wendell


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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