Preserving Markup Characters by Using CDATA Sections

Preserving Markup Characters by Using CDATA Sections

CDATA sections within an XML document can contain markup elements common to XML, without affecting whether the document is well-formed. For example, if you want to include a mathematical XML application using the < and > characters to refer to less-than and greater-than, you can use a CDATA section.

To specify that a given element in the result tree will contain a CDATA section, include the element name as a value of the cdata-section-elements attribute of the <xsl:output> element. The CDATA section created in this way will preserve white space and character entities.

Example

The XSLT processor scans the result tree, making a CDATA section of each item in the cdata-section-elements attribute.

To create the CDATA section, the elements listed as values of the cdata-section-elements attribute must be elements in the result tree, not the source tree. In the preceding examples, the Microsoft JScript® code appears as a text node within the source tree's <scriptcode> element, but the cdata-section-elements attribute refers to and affects <script> elements in the result tree.

HTML does not recognize CDATA sections. Do not use this option when generating HTML.

XML File (cdata.xml)

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="cdata.xsl" ?>
<document>
<scriptcode language="JScript">
function message(msg){
alert(msg);
}
</scriptcode>
</document>

XSLT File (cdata.xsl)

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
      xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output cdata-section-elements="script"/>

<xsl:template match="scriptcode">
<document>
<script language="JScript">
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</script>
</document>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Formatted Output

None (blank).

Processor Output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?><document><script language="JScript"><![CDATA[
function message(msg){
alert(msg);
}
]]></script></document>

See Also

CDATA Sections