xsl:entity-ref

[Mike Kraley]

I continue to be plauged by the problem of how to make an XSL transform
output a character entity, e.g.   Just saying:

<xsl:template match="...">&nbsp;</xsl:template>

converts the entity in the xsl document and so inserts a space in the
output. What I want is to insert the characters "& n b s p ;" to get
inserted in the output.

putting the &nbsp in a CDATA results in the ampersand being quoted as &amp;

In perusing some of the non-microsoft XML/XSL discussions, I see mention of
an xsl command called xsl:entity-ref which looks like it is exactly what I
want. But it is not mentioned in the Microsoft documentation.

But then I happened to notice that Microsoft itself uses that command in
defaultSS.xsl, the stylesheet used to expand XML documents in IE5. How nice
of them.

So I tried it - e.g. <xsl:entity-ref name="nbsp"/>. Even more interesting.

If I use .transformNode, it works fine! just what I want. But if I use
.transformNodeToObject, then I get a parsing error on the output DOM,
reporting "Reference to undefined entity 'nbsp'". This makes sense, because
I haven't, in fact, defined it.

So how do I define it? I thought entities can only be defined in a DTD, and
I'm not using one. Even if I did, then what do I define the output to be? Do
I have to define each special character? or is there some way I can refer to
the HTML spec?

I also tried variations on the theme of <xsl:entity-ref name="#160"/>, since
that's the numeric equivalent (in a MS browser anyway), and you don't have
to define numeric character entity refs (I believe), but they all resulted
in an error during the transform operation.

...Mike

[Microsoft]

transformNodeToObject is running into a completely different problem. Using
&nbsp; in an XML document is not valid XML unless the entity nbsp is defined
in a DTD as follows:

<!DOCTYPE foo [
<!ENTITY nbsp "&#160;">
]>
<foo>&nbsp;</foo>

You will also probably want to turn of validateOnParse in the target
document object.

"Mike Kraley" <mi...@kraley.com> wrote in message
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[Mike Kraley]

OK, that makes sense.

But how do I get XSL to insert a doctype node in the output. I previously
corresponded with you about the difficulty of inserting a DOCTYPE via the
DOM; it seems that it is no easier via XSL, unless I am missing something.

I tried pre-loading the output document with a simple document (as you
describe) before executing the transformNodeToObject, but that seems to get
blown away when the transform takes place.

I tried turning off validateOnParse, but I still get the error.

And, am I correct that if I use any part of a DOCTYPE, then I need a
complete DTD? iow, is there any way to define an entity, but still say that
I don't care about the structure of the document (as if I had not specified
a DOCTYPE)?

thanks

...Mike

Microsoft <anon...@microsoft.com> wrote in message
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