Returning a document fragment from Xalan extension function

Hello all, this is my first posting regarding my very first Xalan extension
function in Java, I'll appreciate your thoughts:

I'm processing the text() nodes and possibly adding markup to plain text
(via external calls to "sed" - I have a set of rather tricky rules
to perform ;-).

When I return the result as a String, any inline "<elem>" gets translated
into "&lt;elem&gt;" in the output. I can understand this since that's how a
String should probably behave...

When I create a DOM Document out of the text result and return it as a Node
or DocumentFragment, any added markup is lost and only concatenated text()
content from the result tree gets into the Xalan output.

What is the proper way of passing the entire "enriched" structure into the
output?

I can actually get by using the "String" method with an additional "sed"
pass of the output file replacing "&lt;" etc. with proper markup, but that's
certainly a crude way of doing it...

Can anybody think about a better way of doing this (instead of
Xalan-XSLT/Java/sed "contraption"). I looked into XSLT 2.0 (Saxon 7) and
EXSLT but I don't think plain regexp match/replace will cut it here - sed
scripts are more powerful/convenient (especially the external and XSL
independent config - based on XSLT params or data).

Thank you,

Michal Urban

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list