Question

I’m trying to output a CDATA section in the result of XSLT using Xalan 2.7.1. I have applied this XSL to the XML in a tool and the result contains CDATA. In the method below, no CDATA is in the result and no exception is thrown. I feel like I’m missing something here.

test.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<parentelem>
    <childelem>Test text</childelem>
</parentelem>

test.xsl

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" cdata-section-elements="newchildelem" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<parentelem>
    <newchildelem><xsl:value-of select="/parentelem/childelem" /></newchildelem>
</parentelem>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Transform.java

import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;

import javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLOutputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamWriter;
import javax.xml.transform.Result;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.stax.StAXResult;
import javax.xml.transform.stax.StAXSource;

public class Transform {

    public static void main (String[] args){
    try {
        XMLStreamReader xmlReader = XMLInputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamReader(
            new FileReader("test.xml"));

        XMLStreamReader xslReader = XMLInputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamReader(
                new FileReader("test.xsl"));

        TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
        Source xslSource = new StAXSource(xslReader);
        Source xmlSource = new StAXSource(xmlReader);
        Transformer transf = transformerFactory.newTransformer(xslSource);

        StringWriter xmlString = new StringWriter();
        XMLStreamWriter xmlWriter = XMLOutputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamWriter(
                xmlString);

        Result transformedXml = new StAXResult(xmlWriter);
        transf.transform(xmlSource, transformedXml);

        xmlWriter.flush();
        System.out.println(xmlString.toString());
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
}
}

console output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><parentelem><newchildelem>Test text</newchildelem></parentelem>

Answer 1

1) I guess it turns out i haven’t been using Xalan 2.7.1. The code in skaffman’s answer made me think to check Version.getVersion() and the signature is “XL TXE Java 1.0.7”. This appears to be the default when using IBM java [IBM J9 VM (build 2.4, J2RE 1.6.0)].

2) I switched from using StAXSource and StAXResult to using StreamSource and StreamResult and it works fine (like in skaffman’s answer). Specifically the change from StAXResult to StreamResult is what worked. Using StAXSource with StreamResult works too.