CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlxmlxsltxslt-1.0
Otuoma Sanya
Otuoma Sanya

Reputation: 138

Value in CDATA tag not being displayed in XSL file?

I want to replace the & symbol inside of a piece of text that is generated dynamically with its encoded value %26 to prevent it from breaking the URL string. I am storing the text inside hrefvalue variable. My goal is to replace & with %26 to be output in the final HTML code in the browser.

For example: "listening & comprehension" should become "listening %26 comprehension"

I am using <![CDATA[ to preserve %26 but this seems not to be working. I still end up with "listening & comprehension" in the browser. Why?

                            <xsl:variable name="hrefvalue" select="./node()" />
                            <xsl:choose>
                                <xsl:when test="contains($hrefvalue, '&amp;')">
                                    <xsl:variable name="string-before" select="substring-before($hrefvalue, '&amp;')" />
                                    <xsl:variable name="string-after" select="substring-after($hrefvalue, '&amp;')" />
                                    <xsl:variable name="ampersand"><![CDATA[%26]]></xsl:variable>
                                    <xsl:value-of select="concat($string-before, $ampersand, $string-after)" disable-output-escaping="yes" />
                                </xsl:when>
                                <xsl:otherwise>
                                    <xsl:value-of select="$hrefvalue" disable-output-escaping="no" />
                                </xsl:otherwise>
                            </xsl:choose>

I am working on a system that uses XSL 1.0

Upvotes: 0

Views: 40

Answers (1)

Michael Kay
Michael Kay

Reputation: 163625

Firstly, the CDATA is completely unnecessary and irrelevant. The only purpose of CDATA is to allow & and < to be written without escaping, and if those special characters are not present, the CDATA tag makes no difference.

Also, if you're generating an attribute (which seems likely if it's a URL) then disable-output-escaping has no effect. But again, it's probably not needed.

Your code only deals with one ampersand in a string.

But your code looks fine. If there's a problem, it's in the part of the code that you haven't shown us. Try to construct a complete reproducible example: a complete stylesheet and source document that we can actually run to see if we can reproduce the problem.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions