Question

I am trying to generate a relative URL with a complex query string using XSLT 1.0 stylesheets (processed by the web browser).

<xsl:variable name="queryLn">sql</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="queryName">ask</xsl:variable>
<a>
    <xsl:attribute name="href">
        <xsl:text>path?action=exec&queryLn=</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="$queryLn" />
    </xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:value-of select="$queryName" />
</a>

I have altered how the variables get assigned for simplicity. In the real code, they get assigned similar values from the XML being transformed. I want the resulting document to contain this:

<a href="path?action=exec&queryLn=sql>ask</a>

Chrome Browswer gives me an error message like error on line XX at column YY: EntityRef: expecting ';', where XX and YY refer to immediately after the <xsl:text> opening tag. I’ve tried adding a disable-output-escaping="yes" attribute to the <xsl:text> element, but that doesn’t have any effect.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Use:

<a href="path?action=exec&amp;queryLn={$queryLn}"><xsl:value-of select="$queryName"/></a>

Your code has these problems:

1. Unescaped & — must be &.

2. Unnecessary <xsl:attribute> — it is recommended that one uses AVT -s (Attribute – Value Templates) always when possible.