Hari's Corner

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HTML inside XML - rendering with XSLT issue

Filed under: Tutorials and HOWTOs by Hari
Posted on Fri, Jul 6, 2007 at 20:09 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:39 IST)

I've been meddling a bit with XML and XSLT, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I want to try and convert my reviews site completely to entirely to XML. I seem to have a strange fascination for XML because the possibilities seem limitless. Anyway, I digress. This topic is really to document a little discovery I made.

When you embed HTML inside XML document elements like this (an example). Note the HTML tags used inside <content> which is used as formatting tags and not part of the XML. 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="index.xsl" ?>

<review>
	<title>A sample review</title>
	<author>A sample author</author>
	<content>
		<p>This is the actual review content</p>
		<p>Hello World! How are you today?</p>
	</content>
</review>

Here's the XSLT file index.xsl I wrote to render the above XML file 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h1>Hari's Reviews</h1>
    <hr />
    <h2><xsl:value-of select="review/title"/> by
<xsl:value-of select="review/author"/></h2>

    <xsl:value-of select="review/content"/>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The above code will not render correctly because the <xsl:value-of select="review/content"/> tag will strip the HTML tags (as they're considered to be actually XML tags) while returning the data.

The correct code will be: <xsl:copy-of select="review/content"/>

Update: The smart quotes problem in the code has been fixed.

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