Question

I am trying to convert a document with content like the following into another document, leaving the CDATA exactly as it was in the first document, but I haven’t figured out how to preserve the CDATA with XSLT.

Initial XML:

<node>
    <subNode>
        <![CDATA[ HI THERE ]]>
    </subNode>
    <subNode>
        <![CDATA[ SOME TEXT ]]>
    </subNode>
</node>

Final XML:

<newDoc>
    <data>
        <text>
            <![CDATA[ HI THERE ]]>
        </text>
        <text>
            <![CDATA[ SOME TEXT ]]>
        </text>
    </data>
</newDoc>

I’ve tried something like this, but no luck, everything gets jumbled:

<xsl:element name="subNode">
    <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
</xsl:element>

Any ideas how to preserve the CDATA?

Thanks!
Lance

Using ruby/nokogiri

Update: Here’s something that works.

<text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;![CDATA[</text>
<value-of select="normalize-space(text())" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
<text disable-output-escaping="yes">]]&gt;</text>

That will wrap all text() nodes in CDATA, which works for what I need, and it will preserve html tags inside the text.

Answer 1

You cannot preserve the precise sequence of CDATA nodes if they’re mixed with plain text nodes. At best, you can force all content of a particular element in the output to be CDATA, by listing that element name in xsl:output/@cdata-section-elements:

<xsl:output cdata-section-elements="text"/>