CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlxslt
geektampa
geektampa

Reputation: 110

How to force open and closing tags in XML transform?

Hi I have a transform where I'm trying to create a static element where the open and closing tags persist in the output.

For example, I've tried...

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<root>
<child>
<!--static values-->
<xsl:element name="ad_version"></xsl:element>
<action_code></action_code>
</child>
</root>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This outputs the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<root>
  <child>
    <ad_version />
    <action_code />
  </child>
</root>

I need...

<ad_version></ad_version>
<action_code></action_code>

Thoughts?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1586

Answers (1)

JohnLBevan
JohnLBevan

Reputation: 24410

Officially there's no difference between empty (<a></a>) and atomic (<a />) tags; so your vendor has a bug if they can't accept this data / really it should be on them to fix since they're not standards compliant.

However, if you have to hack your code to match their standards, there are ways...

  • If you're using Microsoft's .Net XslCompiledTransform you can populate the tags with <xsl:value-of select="''" />; i.e. code which outputs blank at runtime. See XSLT Fiddle Example

  • If you're using Saxon, you can switch the output from xml to xhtml, e.g. <xsl:output method="xhtml". See XSLT Fiddle Example.

For other engines, let us know and we can try to find a hack. For many changing the output to html would likely work, but would lose the XML Declaration (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>), so can cause other issues, especially if you're using characters outside of the normal ASCII range.

Upvotes: 5

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