Question

I’m trying to translate a symbol to its HTML code, e.g. ' to ’ with this code:

<xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="test">&rsquo;</xsl:variable>

<xsl:value-of select='translate(title, $apos, $test)' />

This works:

<xsl:variable name="test">&#39;</xsl:variable>

But is it possible to make the first example work?

Answer 1

You can use recursion in XSLT 1.0:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="test">&amp;rsquo;</xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="input">'sfdds'</xsl:variable>

        <xsl:variable name="result">
            <xsl:call-template name="replace">
                <xsl:with-param name="input" select="$input"/>
                <xsl:with-param name="value" select="$apos"/>
                <xsl:with-param name="replacement" select="$test"/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>

        <xsl:value-of select="$result" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

    </xsl:template>


    <xsl:template name="replace">
        <xsl:param name="input"/>
        <xsl:param name="value"/>
        <xsl:param name="replacement"/>

        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains($input, $value)">
                <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($input, $value)"/>
                <xsl:value-of select="$replacement"/>
                <xsl:call-template name="replace">
                    <xsl:with-param name="input" select="substring-after($input, $value)"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="value" select="$value"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="replacement" select="$replacement"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:when>

            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:value-of select="$input"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>

    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Output:

’sfdds’