xml-dev - RE: Special Character

[Mike Brown <mbrown@corp.webb.net>]

Han Chock Lee wrote:
> I have a xml document which contain 
> 
> <name>Nurse&apos;s Station</name>
> 
> and in the stylesheet, I have specifed it as <xsl:value-of 
> select="name" disable-output-escaping="no"/> to output it
> as &apos; instead of single quote character ' . 

&apos; is for the XML parser's benefit, so that you can use the
ASCII apostrophe character (') as markup instead of character
data.

The only time it is useful is when you use ' as the start
and end delimiter of an attribute value. In such a case,
you can say "the attribute value contains a single
apostrophe character" by putting &apos; where the character
would be. For example:

<station name='Nurse&apos;s Station'/>

The XML parser is going to take &apos; to mean the apostrophe
character ('), not the 6 characters & a p o s ;.

disable-output-escaping in XSLT is only a hint to the XSLT
processor that you would like the processor to output raw
characters in the output encoding, if possible, rather than
character references or entity references like &apos;. The
processor not required to honor the request, and in your
situation, it wouldn't output an apostrophe as &apos; anyway,
since it is not in a single-quoted attribute value.

XSLT questions should be asked on the XSL-List.
See http://www.mulberrytech.com/