XSLT version 1 URL encoding

Question

Hi,

Is there a URL encoding function in XSLT version 1? I need something similar to encodeURIComponent function in javascript?

Seeing as this is not possible as I'm using .NET platform as the XSLT is applied to a Sharepoint page. Is there a way to code this buy calling the javascript encode function within the XML, snippet below:

<xsl:template name="BuildLink">
    <xsl:param name="PrimarySubject" />
    <xsl:text>?PrimarySubject=</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="$PrimarySubject" />
</xsl:template>

Thanks,

Answer 1

There isn't one. XSLT has no knowledge of URLs and HTML.

Depending on the language and platform you are using, you may be able to use a XSLT extension that does that.

Answer 2

You can, under certain circumstances use EXSLT (parser-provided extensions): Dave Pawson's XSLT FAQ on this one.

However, XSLT is Turing complete, so you could write a basic URL encoder in XSLT itself, theoretically (I wouldn't try).

Answer 3

These XSLT 1.0 stylesheets can be used to perform URL encode/decode:

1. url-decode.xsl
2. url-encode.xsl

Description: Only a very small subset of ASCII characters can be safely embedded in a URI. Characters outside this set must be escaped using so-called "URL encoding" or "%-escaping". The characters are converted to bytes according to some encoding (ASCII if possible) and those bytes are each written as a '%' followed by 2 hexadecimal digits. The encoding used as the basis for this conversion can be anything, but tends to be dictated by the context in which the URI is being used. Recent and future standards use UTF-8, but legacy applications including many widely-deployed, server-side processors of HTML form data assume ISO-8859-1.

For example, the greeting "¡Hola, César!" can be embedded in a URI if it is written as follows: %A1Hola%2C%20C%E9sar!. (...assuming ISO-8859-1 as the basis for encoding. If it were UTF-8 based, then it would be %C2%A1Hola%2C%20C%C3%A9sar!).

The url-encode.xsl demo URL-encodes an arbitrary string passed in as a parameter named iso-string. It assumes ISO-8859-1 will be the basis for the URL-encoding. It should be compatible with any XSLT 1.0 processor.

Decoding an ISO-8859-1 based URL-encoded string uses a similar technique. See url-decode.xsl for a demo. Its url parameter is the string to be decoded.