replacing &lt; with < using xslt

[tentstitcher]

Hi all:

I have a source xml document with an element of type string. This
element contains something like the following:
<stringData>
&lt;Header&gt; &lt;Body&gt;
</stringData>

I would like to apply an XSLT and replace all occurances of &lt; with <
and &gt; with >.

I tried the following but without success:

<xsl:template match="stringData">
<xsl:variable name="lessThan" select='<'/>
<xsl:value-of select="translate(text()[1], '&lt;', $lessThan)"/>
</xsl:template>

I'd appreciate any help.

Thanks

 

[Philippe Poulard]

Hi all:

I have a source xml document with an element of type string. This
element contains something like the following:
<stringData>
&lt;Header&gt; &lt;Body&gt;
</stringData>

I would like to apply an XSLT and replace all occurances of &lt; with <
and &gt; with >.

you don't need to : as this is not markup but text, escaping < and >
with &lt; and &gt; is expected by parsers and applications

if you have to produce a text output instead of an XML output, just do
that :

<xslutput method="text"/>
<xsl:template match="stringData">
<xsl:value-of select="text()"/>
</xsl:template>

the output will be :

I tried the following but without success:

<xsl:template match="stringData">
<xsl:variable name="lessThan" select='<'/>

illegal, use &lt;

<xsl:value-of select="translate(text()[1], '&lt;', $lessThan)"/>
</xsl:template>

I'd appreciate any help.

Thanks

--
Cordialement,

///
(. .)
--------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
| Philippe Poulard |

 

[Richard Tobin]

I would like to apply an XSLT and replace all occurances of &lt; with <
and &gt; with >.

You seem to want to transform character data into markup. XSLT is not
well suited to this, since it expects to be working with existing
document structure, and you are giving it (in effect) strings.

The simplest solution, if you can get it to work, is just to copy
the strings with output escaping disabled.

<xsl:value-of select="text()" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

But you may have problems if the strings contain ampersands, since
those will not be escaped either.

The other approach is essentially to parse the text and create the
corresponding elements.

-- Richard

 

[tentstitcher]

Thanks for reply. The source document and the target document are both
SOAP messages. The <stringData> element is read out of the source's
SOAP Body and has to be placed in the target's SOAP Body. The &lt; and
&gt; have to be converted before being added to the target SOAP body so
that the body now contains an new xml element.

I tried the suggestion, yet the SOAP output of the XSLT retains the
&lt; and &gt; occurances.

Thanks

 

[tentstitcher]

Richard,

Thanks for the suggestion. Using <xsl:value-of select="text()"
disable-output-escaping="yes"/> did the job.

Appreciate it!

 

[Philippe Poulard]

Thanks for reply. The source document and the target document are both
SOAP messages. The <stringData> element is read out of the source's
SOAP Body and has to be placed in the target's SOAP Body. The &lt; and
&gt; have to be converted before being added to the target SOAP body so
that the body now contains an new xml element.

as Richard said, you can try :
<xsl:value-of select="text()" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
but the output will be broken if the tags are not well-balanced, which
is the case in your example

you should consider an alternative tool such as RefleX (
http://reflex.gforge.inria.fr/ ) that can fix invalid markup thanks to
an HTML parser ; the process would be :

<xclarse name="input" source="file:///path/to/input.xml"/>
<xclarse-html name="data" text-source="{ string( $input/stringData ) }"/>
<xcl:document name="result">
<stringData>
{ $data }
</stringData>
</xcl:document>
<xcl:transform source="{ $result }" output="file:///path/to/result"/>

there are also means to update the $input, by replacing the old content

I tried the suggestion, yet the SOAP output of the XSLT retains the
&lt; and &gt; occurances.

Thanks

--
Cordialement,

///
(. .)
--------ooO--(_)--Ooo--------
| Philippe Poulard |

 

[Peter Flynn]

Hi all:

I have a source xml document with an element of type string. This
element contains something like the following:
<stringData>
&lt;Header&gt; &lt;Body&gt;
</stringData>

See http://xml.silmaril.ie/authors/html/

///Peter