When to use <xsl:text>

[Derek Fountain]

When is the use of <xsl:text>blah blah</xsl:text> necessary? I'm finding that, although it's used religously in the book I'm learning from, if I miss it out, the output is just the same.

 

[Christopher Boomer]

When is the use of <xsl:text>blah blah</xsl:text> necessary? I'm finding that, although it's used religously in the book I'm learning from, if I miss it out, the output is just the same.

I'm no guru but I'd say the element probably comes into play whenever you are using variables rather than actual text. A similar scenario is possible with <xsl:element name="Mine">, which is equivalent to simply entering <Mine>, but because the attriibute is quoted text, you can use a variable instead.

hth
Christopher Boomer

 

[Andy Fish]

Derek

the main reason you want to use this is when whitespace is significant in the result document. For instance, consider this snippet of xsl

<h1>
details for user
<xsl:value-of select="@username"/>
in group
<xsl:value-of select="@groupname"/>
</h1>

the text node for the phrase 'details for user' starts just after the closing > of <h1> and ends just before the opening < of <xsl:value-of>. All this extra whitespace will be copied into the resulting output. This doesn't normally matter with HTML but you might be using an output format where whitespace is significant or you maybe want the HTML to look nice. in this case you can do this:

<h1>details for user<xsl:value-of select="@username"/>in group<xsl:value-of select="@groupname"/></h1>

but this can get unwieldy (and if you use a pretty printer to reformat your XSL it might break it up again). Here's where xsl:text comes in:

<h1>
<xsl:text>details for user</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="@username"/>
<xsl:text>in group</xsl:text>
<xsl:value-of select="@groupname"/>
</h1>

now you have no whitespace within those text nodes. Instead you have created some new text nodes which just contain the whitespace but fortunately the XSLT processor will ignore those.

Dealing with whitespace in XSL is a pain the butt and you usually don't need to bother. on those occasions where you need to control the whitespace that gets generated, xsl:text is the way to do it

HTH

Andy

 

[Derek Fountain]

HTH

Andy

Yes, it did help, thanks. Makes sense now... )