Question

So, I am working with .NET. I have an XSL file, XslTransform object in C# that reads in the XSL file and transforms a piece of XML data (manufactured in-house) into HTML.

I notice that my final output has < and > automatically encoded into &lt; and &gt;. Is there any ways I can prevent that from happening? Sometimes I need to bold or italicize my text but it’s been unintentionally sanitized.

Answer 1

Your xsl file should have:

• an output of html
• omit namespaces for all used in the xslt

i.e.

<xsl:stylesheet version='1.0'     xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'     xmlns:msxsl='urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt'     exclude-result-prefixes='xsl msxsl'>      <xsl:output method='html' indent='no' omit-xml-declaration='yes'/>      <!-- lots --> </xsl:stylesheet> 

And you should ideally use the overloads that accept either a TextWriter or a Stream (not XmlWriter) – i.e. something like:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); using (XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(source) using (TextWriter writer = new StringWriter(sb)) {     XslCompiledTransform xslt = new XslCompiledTransform();     xslt.Load('Foo.xslt'); // in reality, you'd want to cache this     xslt.Transform(reader, options.XsltOptions, writer); } string html = sb.ToString(); 

In the xslt, if you really want standalone < / > (i.e. you want it to be malformed for some reason), then you need to disable output escaping:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping='yes'>     Your malformed text here </xsl:text> 

However, in general it is correct to escape the characters.