Can I shorten this?

[harryajh]

I need to output some standard text (" : *" i.e. space colon space
asterisk) in loads of places in my XSLT document which outputs XHTML
in XML format.

The best way (several articles recommend using   instead of
 ) I've found to do this is using as follows -

<xslt:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> &amp;nbsp;:&amp ;nbsp;*</
xslt:text>

as this is quite long, is there anyway that I can define it as a sort
of global constant?

I've tried this -

<xslt:variabl e name="mandatory "><xslt:tex t disable-output-
escaping="yes"> &amp;nbsp;:&amp ;nbsp;*</xslt:text></xslt:variable>

and then - <xslt:value-of select="$mandat ory"/>

but this produces "&nbsp;:&nbsp;* "

thanks

harry

[Richard Tobin]

Re: Can I shorten this?

In article <97ed04c6-f2b0-4642-8be7-79be802d8a03@34 g2000hsf.google groups.com>,
harryajh <harryajh@yahoo .co.ukwrote:

>I need to output some standard text (" : *" i.e. space colon space
>asterisk) in loads of places in my XSLT document which outputs XHTML
>in XML format.

I'm a bit confused here. You say you need to output spaces, but then
you start talking about non-breaking spaces:

>The best way (several articles recommend using &amp;nbsp; instead of
>&#160;) I've found to do this is using as follows -

And I'm not clear about this: I can see you might want to produce
&nbsp; instead of &#160; (though they should be equivalent, and the
numeric constant means you don't need a DTD to parse it as XML), but
why would you want "&amp;nbsp; "? Or has your news program munged
the escaping?

-- Richard
--
:wq

[Joseph J. Kesselman]

Re: Can I shorten this?

harryajh wrote:

The best way (several articles recommend using &amp;nbsp; instead of
&#160;)

Good indication that those articles' authors didn't understand XSLT. Try

<xslt:variabl e name="mandatory ">&#160;:&#160; </xslt:variable>

or, if you don't explicitly need a non-breaking space character,

<xslt:variabl e name="mandatory ": </xslt:variable>

[harryajh]

Re: Can I shorten this?

On 23 Apr, 15:29, rich...@cogsci. ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) wrote:

In article <97ed04c6-f2b0-4642-8be7-79be802d8...@34 g2000hsf.google groups.com>,
>
harryajh <harry...@yahoo .co.ukwrote:

I need to output some standard text (" : *" i.e. space colon space
asterisk) in loads of places in my XSLT document which outputs XHTML
in XML format.

>
I'm a bit confused here. You say you need to output spaces, but then
you start talking about non-breaking spaces:
>

The best way (several articles recommend using &amp;nbsp; instead of
&#160;) I've found to do this is using as follows -

>
And I'm not clear about this: I can see you might want to produce
&nbsp; instead of &#160; (though they should be equivalent, and the
numeric constant means you don't need a DTD to parse it as XML), but
why would you want "&amp;nbsp; "? Or has your news program munged
the escaping?
>
-- Richard
--
:wq

sorry for my awful wording, when I said "space" I did indeed mean a
&nbsp;

changed to this

<xslt:variabl e name="mandatory "><xslt:tex t disable-output-
escaping="yes"> &#160;:&#160 ;*</xslt:text></xslt:variable>

and using like this -

<xslt:value-of select="$mandat ory"/>

seems to work well!

thanks anyway!

[Richard Tobin]

Re: Can I shorten this?

In article <8a213e25-8cbc-47c4-bf82-aaec43a06b0a@56 g2000hsm.google groups.com>,
harryajh <harryajh@yahoo .co.ukwrote:

>changed to this
>
<xslt:variabl e name="mandatory "><xslt:tex t disable-output-
>escaping="yes" >&#160;:&#160;* </xslt:text></xslt:variable>

Why are you using disable-output-escaping at all? What's wrong with:

<xsl:variable name="mandatory ">&#160;:&#160; *</xsl:variable>

If the problem is that you don't like the output having literal
non-breaking spaces, you could specify ascii as the output encoding.

-- Richard
--
:wq

[Joseph J. Kesselman]

Re: Can I shorten this?

Why are you using disable-output-escaping at all?

Because the references he had looked at were trying to manually
construct the character sequence '&nbsp;. Which was Very Bad Practice,
as we all agreed.