1. Remove the problem from XSLT's scope altogether. Use a post-processing
routine, such as a Perl or Python script, or sed, to perform substitutions
of characters with named entities in the output files after the XSLT
processor writes them. Maintaining the well-formedness of your output is
your concern.
2. Hack the serializer. You could thus extend XSLT with, for example, a
custom output method. Your serializer would intercept characters you
wanted
to represent with entities, and take care of the escaping. Back when James
Clark's XT was the de-facto reference implementation for XSLT, he
demonstrated how to do something not unlike this.
3. Drive the serializer from within XSLT. Perhaps considered by some to be
bad form since it crosses the line between XSLT processing and
serialization, you can nonetheless do this with the optional
disable-output-escaping feature, if you have it (it's available in Xalan).
I'd call this a legitimate use of d-o-e, assuming of course you understand
this kind of processing is limited in its application (a) to scenarios
where file-writing is part of the pipeline, and (b) in the engines it will
work on -- i.e., it's not as portable as XSLT generally. For this reason
and others, you may want to implement this in a separate stylesheet from
your main transform, and run it as the terminal process in a chain.
Just to add:
4. (iirc) You can implement your own EntityResolver() in java, and then set
the parser to look there to resolve entities. This gives you control of what
gets passed back, so I think you can just pass back the entity reference. I'm
not too sure how you would get on further down the chain - I used this a while
back to parse lots of xml that refencened dtd's that were unreachable (can't
remember why offhand...) but its nice because it's all done with java (no nasty
separate text processing stuff :)
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/org/xml/sax/EntityResolver.html
andrew
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