XSLT: Parsing HTML embedded in XML?

Question

On my web site I have XMLs with my page contents (automatically generated from my DB) - which are displayed using XSLT. The problem is this: I'd like to have some formatting within some of the XML tags. For instance, if I have an XML containing an article in a format like this:

<article>
  <header>Cool article</header>
  <author>Me!</author>
  <content>
    This is an article. It's <b>HUGE</b>, and here's a <a href="http://Www.foo.com"&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.
  </content>
</article>

However, if I simply get the contents using this: <xsl:value-of select="content" /> all the HTML formatting is ignored/lost. I guess it's mistaken for XML child nodes, and not actual data residing in the content node.

What's the preferred way of achieving formatting like what described here?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Either encode your html when you embed it plainly in an elemnet, or use a CDATA block to preserve actual text. Either should work although depending on where the Transform takes place (like browser level via JS) the output may be different with encoded entities.

Answer 2

<xsl:value-of select="content" />

outputs the value of a node. And the value of your <content> node actually is:

This is an article. It's HUGE, and here's a link

What you probably need is to copy the entire node:

<xsl:copy-of select="content" />

This is largely a guess since I don't know how your system works.

Answer 3

You could change the generation of that XML file to put the content in a <![CDATA[ ]]> section, which tells the parser to ignore special content within that section.

Answer 4

When putting the HTML in to the XML document, make sure that any HTML code is encoded before putting it into the XML. For example.

This is an article. It's <b>HUGE</b>, and here's a <a href="http://Www.foo.com"&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;.

Would become:

This is an article. It's <b>HUGE</b>, and here's a <a href="http://www.foo.com">link</a>

or use a CDATA block so that the HTML formatting isn't lost.

Answer 5

I think your problem is this:

 <xsl:output method="xml" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
          media-type="application/html+xml" encoding="utf-8" omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="no"/>

make sure your output is of type html,

application/html

Answer 6

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

This works on all browsers except Firefox.