Appendix D. XSLT Guide

This appendix is a short, task-oriented guide to common stylesheet tasks. It is organized by task; find what you want to do, and this guide will show you how to do it.

How Do I Put Quotes Inside an Attribute Value?

First, remember that attribute values can be quoted with either single quotes or double quotes. If you need to define an attribute with the value "Doug's car," you can do what we just did: use double quotes to contain a value with single quotes inside it. If, however, you need to quote an attribute value that contains both single and double quotes, use the predefined entities " for double quotes and ' for single quotes. Here’s a sample document that contains some examples:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<sampledoc>
  <head>
    <title>Attributes with Quotes</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>This is an XML document that contains elements with attributes. 
    The values of some of those attributes, interestingly enough, contain 
    quotes. Look at the source of the document to see how we did this.</p>
    <tag1 author="Doug 'Gone' Tidwell" 
      editor="Breanna & Meghan's Mom">
      Here's some text
    </tag1>
    <tag2 author='Doug "Geek of the Week" Tidwell' 
      test="$x<7">
      Here's some more text
    </tag2>
    <tag3 author='Doug "The Slug" Tidwell' test="$x>9">
      A final example
    </tag3>
  </body>
</sampledoc>

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