CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xslt
JL.
JL.

Reputation: 81262

How to insert   in XSLT

How can I insert

 

Into an XSLT stylesheet, I keep getting this error:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity

Essentially I want a non breaking space character in the XSLT Template.

Upvotes: 235

Views: 236493

Answers (13)

xerostomus
xerostomus

Reputation: 557

I do not know whether it is useful or not, but I have this work-about:

I define a new entity:

The healthy animal is up<nbsp />and<nbsp />do­ing.

Then I have a new defined template:

<xsl:template match="nbsp" >
    <xsl:text disable-output-escaping='yes'>&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

When parsed it gives:

"The healthy animal is up &nbsp; and &nbsp; doing"

I appreciate that <nbsp/> is almost as long as &nbsp;, so not much typing.

Upvotes: 0

Mattia Vio
Mattia Vio

Reputation: 131

you can also use:

<xsl:value-of select="&#160;"/>

Upvotes: 0

Leonid Dashko
Leonid Dashko

Reputation: 4136

Although answer has been already provided by @brabster and others.
I think more reusable solution would be:

<xsl:variable name="space">&#160;</xsl:variable>
...
<xsl:value-of select="$space"/>

Upvotes: 1

brabster
brabster

Reputation: 43560

Use the entity code &#160; instead.

&nbsp; is a HTML "character entity reference". There is no named entity for non-breaking space in XML, so you use the code &#160;.

Wikipedia includes a list of XML and HTML entities, and you can see that there are only 5 "predefined entities" in XML, but HTML has over 200. I'll also point over to Creating a space (&nbsp;) in XSL which has excellent answers.

Upvotes: 372

Viacheslav
Viacheslav

Reputation: 1

Try to use 

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

But it depends on XSLT processor you are using: the XSLT spec does not require XSLT processors to convert it into "&nbsp;".

Upvotes: 0

Adil
Adil

Reputation: 89

XSLT stylesheets must be well-formed XML. Since "&nbsp;" is not one of the five predefined XML entities, it cannot be directly included in the stylesheet. So coming back to your solution "&#160;" is a perfect replacement of "&nbsp;" you should use.

Example: 

<xsl:value-of select="$txtFName"/>&#160;<xsl:value-of select="$txtLName"/>

Upvotes: 3

jagprinderdeep
jagprinderdeep

Reputation: 396

Use this

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;</xsl:text>nbsp;

edit: Downvoters should probably validate that this works first (it does, and is the most general solution to the problem.)

Upvotes: 23

B H
B H

Reputation: 1878

I was trying to display borders on an empty cell in an HTML table. My old trick of using non-breaking space in empty cells was not working from xslt. I used line break with the same effect. I mention this just in case the reason you were trying to use the non-breaking space was to give some content to an 'empty' table cell in order to turn on the cell borders.

<br/>

Upvotes: 0

Shaam
Shaam

Reputation: 29

When you use the following (without disable-output-escaping!) you'll get a single non-breaking space:

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

Upvotes: 2

Saroj
Saroj

Reputation: 1128

&#160; works really well. However, it will display one of those strange characters in ANSI encoding. <xsl:text> worked best for me.

<xsl:text> </xsl:text>

Upvotes: 52

Sergey Ushakov
Sergey Ushakov

Reputation: 2473

In addition to victor hugo's answer it is possible to get all known character references legal in an XSLT file, like this:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY % w3centities-f PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Combined Set//EN//XML"
      "http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007/w3centities-f.ent">
  %w3centities-f;
]>
...
<xsl:text>&amp; &nbsp; &ndash;</xsl:text>

There is also certain difference in the result of this approach as compared to <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> one. The latter is going to produce string literals like &nbsp; for all kinds of output, even for <xsl:output method="text">, and this may happen to be different from what you might wish... On the contrary, getting entities defined for XSLT template via <!DOCTYPE ... <!ENTITY ... will always produce output consistent with your xsl:output settings.

And when including all character references, it may be wise to use a local entity resolver to keep the XSLT engine from fetching character entity definitions from the Internet. JAXP or explicit Xalan-J users may need a patch for Xalan-J to use the resolver correctly. See my blog XSLT, entities, Java, Xalan... for patch download and comments.

Upvotes: 6

WaterSoul
WaterSoul

Reputation: 387

One can also do this : 

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[&nbsp;]]></xsl:text>

Upvotes: 27

victor hugo
victor hugo

Reputation: 35838

You might want to add the definition for this entity in the beginning of the file (below xml declaration):

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp  "&#160;" >
]>

Also you can add more entities such as Ntilde, Aacute, etc.

Upvotes: 17

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