I have the problem where I need characters outside the ascii
range to be output as references, apart from the pound sign,
which must remain as the actual character.
I don't understand. You want the output to be ASCII, but you
want the # sign output as a hex A3 byte? Those are surely
contradictory requirements.
Long story, I doubt there's a solution (as it's a daft requirement) but here
are the requirements, maybe xslt 2.0 can help me out here:
This xml:
<node value="£">Hello World</node>
Once transformed, looks the same:
<node value="£">Hello World</node>
That is, the non-breaking-space appears as a character reference, and the pound
sign appears as the actual character.
I've tried various combinations of output encodings, d-o-e and character maps,
but I haven't be able to do it so far. How would character maps replace d-o-e
on attributes here? Maybe a 'force-output-escaping' would be useful, as it
does come up on the list now and again where the answer is to specify an
encoding that doesn't contain the character you need in order to force the
serialiser to escape it?
cheers
andrew