Detecting Characters in an XSLT

Question

I have encountered some odd characters that do not display properly in Internet Explorer, such as these: “, –, and ’. I think they're carried over from copy-and-paste Word content.

I am using XSLT to build the page content and it would be great to detect these characters in the XSLT and replace them with valid HTML codes. I already do string replacement in the style sheet, but I'm not sure how detect these encoded characters or whether it's possible.

Answer 1

Using a good XML editor such as XMLSpy should highlight any errors in formatting your XSLT by validating at development time.

Answer 2

What about simply changing the encoding for the Stylesheet as well as its output to UTF-8? The characters you mention are “, – and ’. Certainly not invalid or so, given the correct encoding (the characters are at least perfectly valid in Codepage 1252).

Answer 3

Jeni Tennison's Multiple string replacements may be a good starting point.