HOW TO force XSLT to encode apostrophes as it does for quotes

Question

in input XML I have a tag

<name>Sample " '</name>

in XSL I transform this tag with:

<xsl:variable name="productName" select="substring($elemXPath/name,1,50)"/>
<someTag someAttr="{$productName}"/>

When I run XSLT the output is:

<someTag someAttr="Sample &quot; '"/>

but I'd like to get

<someTag someAttr="Sample &quot; &apos;"/>

instead. I don't want to wrap every use of input data with separate escaping template because there is a waste number of such a places in my xslt.

I tried to encode apostrophes in the input file but when I put

<name>Sample &apos;</name>

to the input file then I got

<someTag someAttr="Sample &amp;apos;"/>

instead of

<someTag someAttr="Sample &apos;"/>

My question is how to force/configure XSLT to encode apostrophes as it does for quotes?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 18 '11 at 13:11

There isn't a way to control serialization to this level in XSLT 1.0.

In XSLT 2.0 use <xsl:character-map> as in the following example:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                 version="2.0">
 <xsl:output method="xml" use-character-maps="myChars" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>

 <xsl:character-map name="myChars">
  <xsl:output-character character="&quot;" string="&amp;quot;"/>
  <xsl:output-character character="&apos;" string="&amp;apos;"/>
 </xsl:character-map>

 <xsl:template match="/">
     <someTag someAttr="Sample &quot; &apos;"   />
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This produces the wanted result:

<someTag someAttr="Sample &quot; &apos;"/>

[This related post](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1103319/1594157) has a solution for XSLT 1.0 which does the job. — sufw, Apr 28 '14 at 04:58
@sufw, `&apos` is certainly different than `'` when both strings are treatd as parsed character content. The first string has length of 5, while the second has length of 1. — Dimitre Novatchev, Apr 28 '14 at 05:20

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 18 '11 at 13:22

In general, you shouldn't care which of two equivalent serialisations of your data the XSLT processor chooses. Any sane consumer of the data will treat them the same way; if it doesn't you should fix the consumer.

However, for pragmatic reasons XSLT 1.0 provides disable-output-escaping and XSLT 2.0 provides character maps so you can tweak the output at this level if you really must.

HOW TO force XSLT to encode apostrophes as it does for quotes

2 Answers2