Question

I am using Umbraco and I need to display an image in a Rss Feed. The feed is generated by Xslt.

Everything works if I do text stuff. Such stuff is technically feasible, but the feed I analyzed had been generated by WordPress.

The challenge is that I have no idea how I can embed within my tag.

I have a variable, say “url”, that returns the full url of the underlying image. How can I insert within ? Remember I am using Xslt to achieve the task.

<content:encoded>          
  <img src="{$url}" />
</content:encoded>

I guess that CDATA must be used, but I am not able to escape correctly illegal characters 🙁

Thanks for your help.

Roland

Answer 1

roland, you’re trying to escape things twice. It’s unnecessary (not to mention hideous!) This page shows:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[This is <i>italics</i>.]]></content:encoded>

I.e. they’re just escaping the markup inside the <content:encoded> once, and they use CDATA to do that. In your case, CDATA is awkward because you need to substitute $url in the middle. So you could use two CDATA sections wrapped around an <xsl:value-of select="$url" />: (indented for clarity)

<content:encoded>
  <![CDATA[<img src="]]>
  <xsl:value-of select='$url' />
  <![CDATA[">]]>
</content:encoded>

But that would be needlessly verbose. The second CDATA section is unneeded. And we can do better while using the same principle: escape the markup characters (once) that would cause the string to be parsed into a tree. In your case, only the initial < needs to be escaped. You can use < instead of CDATA to escape the <. Put this in your XSLT:

<content:encoded>&lt;img src="<xsl:value-of select='$url' />"></content:encoded>

The <xsl:value-of> is not really inside quotes, from XSLT’s perspective… those quotes are just the content of text nodes. The <xsl:value-of> works as a normal XSLT instruction.

Change select='$url' to select="concat($siteUrl, photo)" if that’s what you need. (I.e. photo is a child element of the context node, and its text value is the name of the image file.)