Inside Xslt
Disabling Output Escaping
You can use <xsl:text> when you want characters such as < and & to appear in your output document, rather than < and &. To do that, set the <xsl:text> elements disable-output-escaping attribute to yes (the default is no). Heres an example where I write the text "<PLANET/>" to the output document directly, using <xsl:text> :
<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="PLANETS"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> Planets </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <xsl:apply-templates select="PLANET"/> </BODY> </HTML> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="PLANET"> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping = "yes"> <PLANET/> </xsl:text> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>
Here is the result:
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> Planets </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <PLANET/> <PLANET/> <PLANET/> </BODY> </HTML>
It wasnt necessary to output <PLANET/> using <xsl:text> , of course; I could have placed that element directly into a literal result element. But what about cases where the XSLT processor wont recognize an element you need in your output as a true element? For example, in transitional XHTML documents, you need the element <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"> , but XSLT processors complain that this is not well- formed XML. How can you place this element into the output?
You could try placing this element into a <!CDATA[ ]> section, as youll see in Chapter 6, and try to treat it as simple character data, but XSLT processors still invariably escape the < as < and > as >.
The proper way to add a <!DOCTYPE> element to the output is actually with the doctype-public attribute of the <xsl:output> element as youll see in Chapter 6, but as an example for demonstration purposes, Ill disable output escaping in <xsl:text> here to do the same thing (this is not the recommended way of creating <!DOCTYPE> elements in output documents). Heres how it looks:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output method="xml"/> <xsl:template match="/PLANETS"> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"> </xsl:text> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> The Planets Table </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1> The Planets Table </H1> <TABLE BORDER="2"> <TD>Name</TD> <TD>Mass</TD> <TD>Radius</TD> <TD>Day</TD> <xsl:apply-templates/> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="PLANET"> <TR> <TD><xsl:value-of select="NAME"/></TD> <TD><xsl:apply-templates select="MASS"/></TD> <TD><xsl:apply-templates select="RADIUS"/></TD> <TD><xsl:apply-templates select="DAY"/></TD> </TR> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="MASS"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="@UNITS"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="RADIUS"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="@UNITS"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="DAY"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> <xsl:text> </xsl:text> <xsl:value-of select="@UNITS"/> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>
And heres the result:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> The Planets Table </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1> The Planets Table . . .
Youll see other uses for <xsl:text> throughout this book, including during the discussion of whitespace later in this chapter.