Parsing a document with HTML entities

Hi all,

I've spend the last night googling, for a solution... I've learned a lot, but no solution to this:

I have to transform an xml document to an html fragment using XSL. For the original XML to contain special characters I have the following choices:

- Textdata in UTF-8 within CDATA sections
- named HTML entities
- named HTML entities within CDATA sections

Using numeric representation of entities is not possible, since the xml is produced by flash. So translating client-side is not possible due to performance resons, both for client and for server side (PHP) I am not able to find a function to translate to numeric entities.

When I try to parse the doc with XSLT, I either get an error due to using named entities, or the parser swallows special chars altogether, or it leaves the UTF-8 encoded character in. What I need though, is the output haveing named HTML entities.


I have found and tried the following solutions:

- Give the input xml (named entities without CDATA) an HTML DTD. The XSL Processor doesn't throw an error, but the output is still wrong
- Leave the input XML in UTF-8 without entity encoding and use a <xslutput method="html" encoding="UTF-8"/> to automatically transform the chars - no use
- both of the above with any comination of encoding/decoding to UTF-8 at serveral points during the program

The only thing that works is using <xslutput method="text" encoding="UTF-8"/> with named entities as input, but the the HTML tags in my XSL get swallowed, so that is no practical solution.


Any suggestions are very much appreciated, thanks in advance!

I've had a lot of trouble with this in the past. The only thing I can suggest you look at is disable-output-escaping. You should be able to google for some help with that. The problems you're going to run into there is that disabling output escaping isn't a required portion of the w3c spec, so not all parsers support it (most do, though).

Yes! Thanks a lot, works perfectly.