RE: CDATA Help (in SAXON)

[Kay Michael <Michael dot Kay at icl dot com>]

The best place for Saxon-specific questions is saxon.xsl@listbot.com
 
> Can someone please explain to me why the following :
> 
>     <![CDATA[<BR/>]]>
> 
> ... gets converted to the following when output is set to html :
> 
>     &lt;BR/>
> 
> 
> Verbosely: The left less-than bracket is being converted to 
> &lt; while the right
> is left untouched... ideally I would like them to BOTH be 
> left untouched...

Because the angle brackets are in a CDATA section, they are ordinary
characters, not markup, so they have to be output as ordinary characters.
This means they have to be output in a way that ensures they will not be
mistaken for markup. In this particular context, ">" will not be taken as
markup, but "<" will, this is why one is escaped and the other isn't.

In fact, the latest Saxon release reverts to escaping both "<" and ">"
because of the special problems of handling "]]>".

If you want the characters output as markup, then either (a) remove the
CDATA wrapper, or (b) use disable-output-escaping="yes" on the
<xsl:value-of> or <xsl:text> instruction.

> as a side note... what version of SAXON removed method 
> makeStyleSheetInstance from com.icl.saxon.PreparedStyleSheet?

The changes.html file provides a fairly complete record of what changes were
made when. I've been gradually moving towards the (still unfinished) TrAX
API. The equivalent in TrAX is newTransformer().
> 
> I'm afraid I don't know what version of SAXON I have.

Just run it with the -t option from the command line and it will tell you.

Mike Kay


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