XSLT string with HTML entities - How can I get it to render as HTML?

Question

I'm completely new to using XSL, so if there's any information that I'm neglecting to include, just let me know.

I have a string in my XSLT file that I can display like this:

<xsl:value-of select="@Description/>

and it shows up, rendered in a browser like:

<div>I can't do anything about the html entities existing in the text.</div> <div>This includes quotes, like  &quot;Hello World&quot; and sometimes whitespaces.&nbsp;</div>

What can I do to get this string rendered as html, so that <div></div> results in newlines, " gives me ", and   gives me a space?

I could elaborate on things I've already tried that haven't worked, but I don't know if that's relevant.

Answer 1

I think you want to set the following attribute as so:

<xsl:value-of select="@Description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

Answer 2

Why do you need to have entities output? To the browser   is the same as   -- in both cases it will display a non-breaking space.

There is a feature in XSLT 2.0 called character-maps, that provide this functionality, if really needed. It is an XSLT best practice to try not to use DOE, unless absolutely necessary.

Also, DOE is not a mandatory feature of XSLT and some XSLT processors may not implement it. This means that an XSLT application that uses DOE is generally not portable across different XSLT processors.

Answer 3

The reason divs in HTML get an endline is completely different and related to the CSS boxmodel. Most browsers apply the style:

div {display:block;}

In lieu of the standard display:inline;. However, they only do that to divs in the XHTML namespace. You need to output divs to the XHTML namespace to faciliate that. Bind the XHTML namespace to the prefix xhtml at the top of your document like so:

<xsl:stylesheet xmnls:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ... >

And then output the divs as <xhtml:div> ... </xhtml:div> most browsers would recognise the div to be in the XHTML namespace (http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml) and apply the block style.