Re: Catch a Character ...

Michael Ludwig <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.text.xml.xalan.java.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Claus Kick schrieb:
> 2009/9/21 Michael Ludwig <[email protected]>
>> Claus Kick schrieb:
>>
>>> <xsl:param name="specChar" select="'\u201C'" />
>>>
>> That's the Java syntax. Doesn't work in XML. Use a numerical
>> character reference as per the XML spec.
>>
>>  <xsl:param name="specChar" select="'&#x201C;'" /> in hex, or
>>  <xsl:param name="specChar" select="'&#8220;'" /> in decimal
>
> OK, I completely forgot about that. That actually was the issue ...

Good! (BTW, this list doesn't set the Reply-To header to the list,
which I think it should really do.)

> Ok, thank you so much for your pointers, I have actually quite a few
> transformations to work on, so this will indeed help me deepening my
> knowledge!

Okay then, here are some more pointers :-) It helps to get familiarized
with the weird XML and XSLT terminology. As for XML:

* numerical character reference - as above
* entity reference - &lt; (built-in), &myEnt; (user-defined) - same
   syntax, but not exactly the same thing
* entities (XML/DTD)
   * general entity
     * external [general] parsed entity (EGPE)
     * external [general] unparsed entity
   * parameter entity
* internal subset (DTD)
* external subset (DTD)

You can read up on those in the XML recommendation (specification). The
terminology is a bit weird. The thing to keep in mind is that the stuff
is easier than the terminology. As for XSLT:

* attribute value template (AVT)
* result tree fragment (RTF)
* node set
* literal result element
* match pattern
* node test

See this page [1] on Dave Pawson's site, which is a great resource for
XSLT. Also, see Jeni Tennison's site [2], which has very nice tutorials.
Also, see a recent thread on XSL-List [3] for more pointers.

Finally, Xalan is a 1.0 processor. XSLT 2.0 is much more powerful than
1.0. Personally, I find it quite okay to get started with 1.0, which is
a much smaller language, and therefore easier to learn. But 1.0 has its
limits, and when reaching those, it's good to know about (a) EXSLT [4],
(b) extension functions (for example, JavaScript in Xalan), (c) the
possibility to upgrade to 2.0 by switching to Saxon.

[1] http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/xslvocab.html
[2] http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/
[3] http://markmail.org/thread/myu2h7quwbh4rjdi - How did you learn XSL?
[4] http://exslt.org/

Cheers,

-- 
Michael Ludwig
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