Escape single quote in xslt concat function

Question

I want to output single quote around $ID variable in the below xsl:value-of xsl statment.

<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=',$ID,']')"></xsl:value-of>

currently it prints

process@Ref=87799989

How can I achieve this?

Good Question (+1). See my answer for a complete solution. :) — Dimitre Novatchev, May 22 '10 at 14:56
Good Question (and answered thankfully!) ; this was driving me nuts ! — monojohnny, Jun 22 '12 at 15:15

Dimitre Novatchev · Answer 1 · 2013-06-13T14:23:38.803

51

In XPath 1.0:

You can use the built-in entities ' and "

In XSLT 1.0:

Alternatively, you can define your $Q and $APOS variables (put the content (the literal " or the literal ' character) in the body of the xsl:variable, not in the select attribute).

In XPath 2.x (this also means XSLT 2.x and XQuery 1.x)

Simply escape an apostrophe by entering two adjacent apostrophes, escape a quote by entering two adjacent quotes, as defined by the XPath 2.0 language

edited Jun 13 '13 at 14:23

answered May 22 '10 at 14:55

Dimitre Novatchev

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Could you please provide examples? (one example tells more than 1000 words and pushes your answer to the top). Thanks – Richard Gomes Jul 27 '13 at 20:30
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@RichardGomes, See this: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7617563/36305 ,or this: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3453956/36305 , or this: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8783655/36305 – Dimitre Novatchev Jul 27 '13 at 21:49

score 40 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 15 '11 at 21:27

40

To expand on Dimitre's answer, you can use this solution in XSLT:

<xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=',$apos,$ID,$apos,']')"></xsl:value-of>

answered Jun 15 '11 at 21:27

Veloz

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The variable method works and looks the most readable (IMHO). – monojohnny Jun 22 '12 at 15:14
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This is the second time that this solution has saved me wasting hours of trial and error and debugging time. – GuruM Oct 03 '12 at 12:21
Seems to work in XSLT 1.0 and 2.0, which I liked because then I can put it into a common.xslt file. – Craig Silver Jun 19 '17 at 20:47

score 34 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

34

Use '?

<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=&apos;',$ID,'&apos;]')"></xsl:value-of>

Edit: See Dimitre's answer for a better solution.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:46

Community

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answered May 22 '10 at 07:21

kennytm

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It's odd this worked; as ' should be decoded equivalent to a literal '. Perhaps a buggy XSLT engine? – Eamon Nerbonne Jul 13 '12 at 10:03
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Yuo need to use both ' and the single quote together: ```''``` – Vadim Peretokin Aug 21 '13 at 02:54
@Vadi - ' and the single quote doesn't seem to work for gmail filters but it worked without the single quote. – Octipi Sep 06 '13 at 15:13
@Vadi - Thanks a lot for that suggestion. I went crazy trying to escape it. – Sid Dec 04 '14 at 16:59

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 07 '10 at 09:43

5

<xsl:value-of
select="concat('process[@Ref=&apos;',$ID,'&apos;]')"></xsl:value-of>

this doesn't work for me. My solution is:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(&quot;process[@Ref='&quot;,$oidConstant,&quot;'&quot;)"></xsl:value-of>

answered Dec 07 '10 at 09:43

Simon

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I was skeptical but this works - the plain text double quote contains the select statement and the encoded doubles are consumed by the parser - nice – Paxic Jan 26 '17 at 23:46

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 07 '14 at 13:47

0

Easy Example would be

      <xsl:variable name="varTitle" select="title" />
<xsl:variable name="APOS">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="translate($varTitle, 'any text', $APOS)"/>

This will replace "any text" with ' in my title.

answered Mar 07 '14 at 13:47

user3392863

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tanius · Answer 6 · 2020-07-03T19:45:14.503

Instead of using concat(), you can do the string concatenation inside a variable assignment. That allows to write a simple, unescaped ' to mean ':

<xsl:variable name="process-selector">process[@Ref='<xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>']</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />

With the recommended way to allow linebreaks without accidentally adding whitespace to the output, this becomes quite lengthy (but that's XSL, right?):

<xsl:variable name="process-selector">
    <xsl:text>process[@Ref='</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>
    <xsl:text>']</xsl:text>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />

Full XSL file for this solution to test, for example with an online XSL-T service like xsltransform.net:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
    <xsl:output method="html"/>

    <xsl:template match="/" name="strip-space" >
        <xsl:variable name="ID" select="123"/>
        <xsl:variable name="process-selector">
            <xsl:text>process[@Ref='</xsl:text>
            <xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>
            <xsl:text>']</xsl:text>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

Escape single quote in xslt concat function

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