Styjun

I am working with some XML inside of XSLT. I want to save a section of it in a content node. I left the CDATA node out of this example.

When I grab the xml like this it's escaped ie. < = <

<content name="test”>
 <xsl:copy-of select="//content[@name='something']/node()" />
</content>

But I need to do some processing on the data before I store it in a content node. I have an xsl:for-each call and it loops saving sections. However, when I call a similar command I can't get the XML to escape.

<xsl:for-each select="exsl:node-set($xml)//data">
 <content name="test">
 <xsl:copy-of select="./node()" />
 </content>

I've put CDATA nodes around it and outputted the content, but then I have issues in the system with double escaping. I really need this copy-of call to output escaped XML.

I really want something like:

<content name="test">
 &lt;data&gt;Some data&lt;data&gt;
 </content>

Input would be something like this:

<root>
<data>Some data</data>
<data>more data</data>
</root>

This a simplification of the data. There would be additional xml nodes in the data node.

Evan Lenz has an XSLT 1 based implementation of XML serialization at http://lenzconsulting.com/xml-to-string/: if you use that you have e.g.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 version="1.0">

 <xsl:import href="http://lenzconsulting.com/xml-to-string/xml-to-string.xsl"/>

 <xsl:output indent="yes" cdata-section-elements="content"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
 <xsl:apply-templates/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
 <xsl:copy>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
 </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="data">
 <content>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="." mode="xml-to-string"/>
 </content> 
 </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

https://xsltfiddle.liberty-development.net/pPzifpn/4

If the processor is libxslt then it might allow you to implement an extension function, for instance PHP allows you to call PHP functions and the DOMDocument in PHP has a saveXML function to serialize, so you can call that from XSLT:

<?php

function serializeNode($node) 
 return $node[0]->ownerDocument->saveXML($node[0]);


$xml = <<<EOT
<root>
<data>Some data</data>
<data>more data</data>
</root>
EOT;

$xsl = <<<EOT
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:php="http://php.net/xsl"
 exclude-result-prefixes="php"
 version="1.0">

 <xsl:output indent="yes" cdata-section-elements="content"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
 <xsl:apply-templates/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
 <xsl:copy>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
 </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="data">
 <content>
 <xsl:value-of select="php:function('serializeNode', .)"/>
 </content> 
 </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
EOT;

$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($xml);

$proc = new XSLTProcessor();
$proc->registerPHPFunctions('serializeNode');

$sheet = new DOMDocument();
$sheet->loadXML($xsl);

$proc->importStylesheet($sheet);

echo $proc->transformToXml($doc);

?>