Question

I have this message that has a CDATA content. I want to turn it into the unCDATA format such as :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mymessage <![CDATA[<xyz>1234</xyz>]]></mymessage>

turn into 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mymessage &lt;xyz>1234&lt;/xyz></mymessage>

So I want to get rid of the CDATA and convert my message to a stripped version. Anyone knows how to use xsl to do this ? Or is it possible to do such thing in xsl ?

Answer 1

You can even avoid the escape characters (when proper xml nodes in CDATA blocks!) by applying the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet
    version="2.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format"
    xmlns:dt="http://exslt.org/dates-and-times"
    xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common"
    extension-element-prefixes="dt exsl">

    <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="text()">
        <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

which, when applied to

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mymessage><![CDATA[<xyz>1234</xyz>]]></mymessage>

gives

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mymessage><xyz>1234</xyz></mymessage>

In general of course, this is not recommended (the CDATA block was placed there for a reason), so best leave out the template matching text(). In that case the result will be

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mymessage>&lt;xyz&gt;1234&lt;/xyz&gt;</mymessage>