Hey Neil,
One more thing about these fake character references...
Believe it or not these are actually real character references. They are
both real references and they reference real characters. I understand that
you are not used to looking at characters like this but this is something
that you will need to embrace and understand or youre going to find yourself
getting really frustrated every time you encounter them... which is pretty
much every time you create a stylesheet.
I tried to change the output method to text like this...
<xsl:output method="text" encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>
XSLT 1.0 supports three(3) output methods... xml, html, and text. An XSLT
1.0 compliant processor will follow the rules set forth in the 1.0
specification. Its definitely a GREAT read! ;) Well, a MANDATORY read none
the less... Before you can begin to understand why things are done a
certain way you need to read the specification they were built against.
Things will make a lot more sense once you have done this... I can promise
you one thing. You will save yourself about 5 days of frustration for every
1 hour you spend studying the specification. With only 2.5 days left in the
week it might be a good idea to spend the next 1/2 day reading and the next
2 implementing. I promise that you are more likely to meet your deadline if
you take the time to do this than if you don't.
Heres the link... http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
Some other great resources that help make more sense of the spec...
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/index.html
http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/index.html
And I don't get them any more, but the outputted text is not formatted (no
margins, italic, paragraphs ...).
Once you read the spec you will understand why this is. But in the case of
"text" it should be pretty obvious why you are getting this result. Text is
not a markup language. So when you output as text you are literally going
to get the actual text representation (based on the encoding you declare for
your output, utf-8 if none) of a character (what would be considered by the
majority of the world as readable text and by you as "not fake" ;). A good
example of what people might use text output for is generating source code
such as C++ (or any other format that doesn't have ML as part of is
acronymic (I have no idea if that's a word but it sounds cool so Im sticking
with it ;) structure.) Obviously markup character sare not a standard part
of the C++ syntax e.g the statement... cout << "one" << endl;
wouldn't compile all that well. The need to output literal strings of text
then is mandatory for this type of output. So instead of < it will
output < producing the much more compilable cout << "one" << endl;
There are certain characteristics of HTML output as well as XML output that
are there by design. <?xml version="1.0"?> is the mandatory minimum as the
first line starting at the first character of an XML document. Otherwise it
would not be a valid XML file and therefore could not be parsed by an XML
parser. Therefore if you set your output method to XML you are going to get
this as your very first line starting with your very first character. There
is an attribute called omit-xml-decleration that will allow you to tell the
processor to not output the XML declaration. This is so you can output XML
data that is well formed but is not necessarily a valid XML file. An
example would be XHTML. I mention this because if you were to attempt to
create an XHTML file using the output method of HTML you would find yourself
frustrated with the results. (more about why in the spec...)
I hope it can help... I have to finish this project by the end of the
week...
Everyone here will help you in any way we can. And at this point the best
thing anybody can do for you is to encourage you to read the spec. There is
no doubt you will have questions. In fact (and I cant speak for everybody
here but this is probably a pretty safe blanket statement) I find myself
referencing the spec 2 or 3 times a week trying to engrain further some of
the more fine tuned aspects of the specification. It's a never ending
learning process but it does get easier... It just takes some legwork on
your part to get there first.
Thanks for your help
Youre welcome :)
Best of luck to you Neil! Don't hesitate to continue to ask questions.
That's what we are here for. And if you take the time to study on your own
youll find that people here are even more willing to help you gain a greater
understanding of the technology.
Cheers and good luck!
<M:D/>
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