Re: [xsl] Parsing Input Data for well-formedness

[Wendell Piez <wapiez at mulberrytech dot com>]

Marty,

The only characters you need to worry about are '&' and '<'. XML is 
deliberately put together this way.

Why are double escapings a problem? you just have to find, and escape, any 
'&' or '<' that is not a markup delimiter.

How bad the problem is depends on what's coming in. If it's well-formed XML 
(which you've said it isn't, I know),  all '&' and '<' are markup 
delimiters except those in CDATA marked sections. If it's plain text, none 
of them will be markup delimiters since there's no markup. If it's 
something else, things get trickier. HTML would be such a format, or 
non-well-formed pseudo-XML fragments. In this case, you need to know not 
only what you want from these characters (that's pretty easy: &amp; or 
&lt;), but also what you want to happen to your markup (and how you tell 
it's markup).

Which of these do you have?

Cheers,
Wendell

At 01:45 PM 10/9/01, you wrote:
>When building an XML file from external data, we need to validate that each
>input string is well-formed.  The specific situation is a Loan Type field
>which returns "A&D".  Before we populate our XML file, we need to convert
>this to "A&amp;D".  Otherwise the XSLT will complain and not render the
>final page.
>
>Before we build a utility class for checking/correcting these (all?!?) input
>strings, i have to ask the obvious -- has anyone already created something
>like this?  Certainly there are many other characters we will need to
>consider, and we'll have to watch out for double-escaping things
>(A&amp;amp;D).
>
>Must i reinvent this wheel?


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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com
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