I have XML that has encoded HTML data. I am trying to render the data but can't seem to figure out how. Best I can tell is I need to disable-output-escaping="yes" twice but not sure how to do that.
For example, this is a snippet of my XML:
<root>
<node value="&lt;b&gt;body&lt;/b&gt;" />
</root>
My XSLT is outputting HTML. Here is the rendered output (the HTML source) with various options
<xsl:value-of select="@value" /> outputs &lt;b&gt;hi&lt;/b&gt;<xsl:value-of select="@value" disable-output-escaping="yes" /> outputs <b>hi</b>
I would like it to output <b>hi</b> to the HTML source so its actually rendered as a bolded hi. Does that make sense? Is that possible?
Escaping is the process of turning < into <. If you disable escaping, it will leave < as <. What you want to achieve is to turn < into <, which would normally be called "unescaping".
In the normal course of events, a parser performs unescaping, while a serializer performs escaping. So if you want to unescape characters, you need to put them through a parsing process, which means you need to take the content of the @value attribute and put it through an operation like fn:parse-xml-fragment() in XPath 3.0, or an equivalent extension function in your chosen processor.
Assuming Sharepoint as a Microsoft .NET product uses XslCompiledTransform you could try to implement the unescaping and parsing with extension "script" (C# or VB or JScript.NET code embedded in XSLT) as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet
version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
xmlns:mf="http://example.com/mf"
exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl mf">
<msxsl:script language="C#" implements-prefix="mf">
<msxsl:using namespace="System.IO"/>
public string Unescape(string input)
{
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
XmlDocumentFragment frag = doc.CreateDocumentFragment();
frag.InnerXml = input;
return frag.InnerText;
}
public XPathNavigator ParseXml(string xmlInput)
{
using (StringReader sr = new StringReader(xmlInput))
{
return new XPathDocument(sr).CreateNavigator();
}
}
</msxsl:script>
<xsl:output method="html" doctype-public="XSLT-compat" omit-xml-declaration="yes" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="node">
<div>
<xsl:copy-of select="mf:ParseXml(mf:Unescape(@value))" />
</div>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
If you have access to an XSLT processor (like any version of Saxon 9.7 or Exselt or the latest Altova or XmlPrime) supporting the XPath 3 functions parse-xml and parse-xml-fragment you can write that template without extension functions (in a version="3.0" stylesheet) as
<xsl:template match="node">
<div>
<xsl:copy-of select="parse-xml(string(parse-xml-fragment(@value)))"/>
</div>
</xsl:template>
Output your result with disable-output-escaping, then treat it again in another XSL with disable-output-escaping.
