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Asked: 2026-05-13T19:38:09+00:00

I’m stuck on what I think should be simple thing to do. I’ve been

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I’m stuck on what I think should be simple thing to do. I’ve been looking around, but didn’t find the solution. Hope you will help me.

What I have is an XML element with an attribute that contains escaped HTML elements:

<Booking>    
  <BookingComments Type="RAM" comment="RAM name fred&lt;br/&gt;Tel 09876554&lt;br/&gt;Email fred@bla.com" />
</Booking>

What I need to get is parsed HTML elements and content from the @comment attribute to be a content of

element as follows:

<p>
  RAM name fred<br/>Tel 09876554<br/>Email fred@bla.com
<p>

Here is my XSLT:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions" exclude-result-prefixes="xs fn" version="1.0">


<xsl:output method="html" doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" 
    doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />

 <xsl:template name="some-template">
   <p>Some text</p>
   <p>
      <xsl:copy-of
        select="/Booking/BookingComments[lower-case(@Type)='ram'][1]/@comment"/>
   </p>     
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I’ve read that copy-of is a good way to restore escaped HTML elements back to proper elements. In this specific case, because it’s initially an attribute the copy-of translates it into attribute as well. So I get:

<p comment="RAM name fred<br/&gt;Tel 09876554<br/&gt;Email fred@bla.com"></p>

Which isn’t what I want.

If I use apply-templates instead of copy-of, as in:

<p>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="/Booking/BookingComments[lower-case(@Type)='ram'[1]/@comment"/>
</p>

I get p’s content simply as text, not restored HTML elements.

<p>RAM name fred&lt;br/&gt;Tel 09876554&lt;br/&gt;Email fred@bla.com</p>

I’m sure I’m missing something obvous. I would really appreciate any help and tips!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would recommend using a dedicated template:

    <!-- check if lower-casing @Type is really necessary -->
<xsl:template name="BookingComments[lower-case(@Type)='ram']/@comment">
  <p>
    <xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes" />
  </p>     
</xsl:template>

    This way you could simply apply templates to the attribute. Note that disabling output escaping has the potential to generate ill-formed output.

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