UPDATE: I added an answer to this question which incorporates almost all the suggestions which have been given. The original template given in the code below needed 45605ms to finish a real world input document (english text about script programming). The revised template in the community wiki answer brought the runtime down to 605ms!
I'm using the following XSLT template for replacing a few special characters in a string with their escaped variants; it calls itself recursively using a divide-and-conquer strategy, eventually looking at every single character in a given string. It then decides whether the character should be printed as it is, or whether any form of escaping is necessary:
<xsl:template name="escape-text">
<xsl:param name="s" select="."/>
<xsl:param name="len" select="string-length($s)"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$len >= 2">
<xsl:variable name="halflen" select="round($len div 2)"/>
<xsl:variable name="left">
<xsl:call-template name="escape-text">
<xsl:with-param name="s" select="substring($s, 1, $halflen)"/>
<xsl:with-param name="len" select="$halflen"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="right">
<xsl:call-template name="escape-text">
<xsl:with-param name="s" select="substring($s, $halflen + 1)"/>
<xsl:with-param name="len" select="$halflen"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="concat($left, $right)"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$s = '"'">
<xsl:text>"\""</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '@'">
<xsl:text>"@"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '|'">
<xsl:text>"|"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '#'">
<xsl:text>"#"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '\'">
<xsl:text>"\\"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '}'">
<xsl:text>"}"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '&'">
<xsl:text>"&"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '^'">
<xsl:text>"^"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '~'">
<xsl:text>"~"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '/'">
<xsl:text>"/"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:when test="$s = '{'">
<xsl:text>"{"</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="$s"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
This template accounts for the majority of runtime which my XSLT script needs. Replacing the above escape-text template with just
<xsl:template name="escape-text">
<xsl:param name="s" select="."/>
<xsl:value-of select="$s"/>
</xsl:template>
makes the runtime of my XSLT script go from 45 seconds to less than one seconds on one of my documents.
Hence my question: how can I speed up my escape-text template? I'm using xsltproc and I'd prefer a pure XSLT 1.0 solution. XSLT 2.0 solutions would be welcome too. However, external libraries might not be useful for this project - I'd still be interested in any solutions using them though.