Home/ Questions/Q 373047
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T14:16:13+00:00

I am having trouble transforming particular characters from an XML feed into XHTML. I

  • 0

I am having trouble transforming particular characters from an XML feed into XHTML.

I am using the following example to demonstrate the problem.

Here is my XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<paragraph>some text including the –, ã and ’ characters</paragraph>

Here is the XSLT I am applying:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" 
            encoding="UTF-8" 
            indent="yes"
            doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
            doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd" />
    <xsl:template match="paragraph">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
            <head></head>
            <body>
        <p><xsl:apply-templates/></p>
            </body>
        </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Here is the resultant XHTML:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
    <head></head>
    <body>
    <p>some text including the –, ã and ’ characters</p>
    </body>
</html>

The characters from the original XML are being replaced with new ones.

Firstly I want to check whether there is something wrong with my encoding which causes this issue?

Am I supposed to do something using entities if I want to map the special characters to display correctly in XHTML? If so how do I use these within an XSLT and do I need to know every single possible value that could be in my XML feed in advance?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I agree the kdgregory: The output file looks to be in UTF-8, but its reader thinks it is in something else (ISO-8859-1 or CP-1252 (the default for Windows)). Try adding a content type directly in the HTML head element:

    <head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>

    and see if that helps.

    • 0