XSLT, 2nd Edition

Name

<xsl:text>

Allows you to write literal text to the output document. The main benefit of the <xsl:text> element is that it gives you complete control over whitespace in the output.

Category

Instruction.

Required Attributes

None.

Optional Attribute

disable-output-escaping

Defines whether special characters are escaped when they are written to the output document. For example, if the literal text contains the character >, it is normally written to the output document as >. If you code disable-output-escaping="yes", the character > is written instead. Note that If you’re using <xsl:output method="text">, this attribute is ignored because output escaping is not done for the text output method.

[2.0] In XSLT 2.0, this attribute is deprecated. Instead you should use the new [2.0] <xsl:character-map> element.

Content

Literal text and entity references (
, for example). These are known collectively as PCDATA, or parsed character data.

Appears in

<xsl:text> appears inside a template.

Defined in

[1.0] XSLT section 7.2, “Creating Text.”

[2.0] XSLT section 11.4.2, “Creating Text Nodes Using xsl:text.”

Example

This sample stylesheet generates text with <xsl:text>. We intermingle <xsl:text> and <xsl:value-of> elements to create a coherent sentence. In this case, we simply generate a text document, but this technique works equally well to create the text of an HTML or XML element. Here is the stylesheet:

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