Question

I’m using XslCompiledTranform to transform XML/XSL.

This is my test XSL:

<span title="{./tooltip}" anattribute="{./tooltip}">
<xsl:value-of select="./tooltip"/>
</span>

You can see that for testing I put the same XSL value, namely @tooltip into the title attribute, an undefined anattribute attribute and also as text into the node.

In my XML the @tooltip is encoded like this “this is a <script> tag“. To be more precise: there are no HTML tags in the value. Everything is encoded, hence the < and >

If I transform the above I get as result:

<span title="this is a <script> tag" anattribute="this is a <script> tag">
this is a &lt;script&gt; tag
</span>

Why is keeping the encoding for node values and why is it substituting the encoded values for attributes? And most important: how can I stop XslCompiledTransform from behaving like that? I want my attributes exactly the way I specified them and no magic conversion going on.

My settings are as follows:

var oXSL = new XslCompiledTransform( );
XsltSettings oXslSettings = new XsltSettings( );
XmlUrlResolver oUriResolver = new XmlUrlResolver( );
oXslSettings.EnableDocumentFunction = true;
oXslSettings.EnableScript = false;
oXSL.Load( sXslPath, oXslSettings, oUriResolver );

René

Answer 1

The html output method should not escape < characters occurring in
attribute values.

For more information read spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#section-HTML-Output-Method

Use <xsl:output method="xml"/>

Input XML:

<root>
    <tooltip>this is a &lt;script&gt; tag</tooltip>
</root>

XSLT:

<?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" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="root">
        <span title="{tooltip}" anattribute="{tooltip}">
            <xsl:value-of select="tooltip"/>
        </span>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

C# source code:

var oXSL = new XslCompiledTransform();
XsltSettings oXslSettings = new XsltSettings();
XmlUrlResolver oUriResolver = new XmlUrlResolver();
oXslSettings.EnableDocumentFunction = true;
oXslSettings.EnableScript = false;
oXSL.Load(@"1.xslt", oXslSettings, oUriResolver);    
oXSL.Transform(@"input.xml", @"output.xml");

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<span title="this is a &lt;script&gt; tag" anattribute="this is a &lt;script&gt; tag">this is a &lt;script&gt; tag</span>