CDATA With XSLT

In an XML file you can use CDATA to tell the parser that anything inside the CDATA element is your text data and not XML formatting. In a sense, you can use CDATA to escape data that looks like XML. See Escape From XML. For example, you can escape the ampersand like this:

&

or by using CDATA as in:

<![CDATA[ & ]]>

I often work with XML and XSLT so when I want to treat a block of HTML as data I use the CDATA element in my XML file that will later be transformed with an XSL. For example, in my XML I might have something like this:

<![CDATA[
   <b>this is bold</b>
]]>

In my XSL file, I need to disable the data from being escaped by using the disable-output-escaping of the xsl:value-of tag as in:

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

If you forget the disable-output-escaping attribute the contents of the CDATA will be escaped, for example < will be transformed to &lt;. With the disable-output-escaping attribute set to yes, the contents from the CDATA will not be escaped and treated as is.

Related posts:

1. Escape From XML
2. Using Dom4J: Reading An XML File
3. WordprocessingML
4. Flex On Rails
5. Using Dom4J: Writing An XML