Producing a new line in XSLT

C

13

221

I want to produce a newline for text output in XSLT. Any ideas?

Clarindaclarine answered 6/4, 2009 at 21:2 Comment(0)

C

271

The following XSL code will produce a newline (line feed) character:

<xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text>

For a carriage return, use:

<xsl:text>&#xd;</xsl:text>

Corollaceous answered 19/8, 2010 at 13:1 Comment(1)

+1: this is more robust than the <xsl:text> containing a newline approach if you use anything that might reformat your XSL file and mess with the whitespace. – Emerick 9/11, 2012 at 0:17

H

50

My favoured method for doing this looks something like:

<xsl:stylesheet>

<xsl:output method='text'/>

<xsl:variable name='newline'><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

<!-- note that the layout there is deliberate -->

...

</xsl:stylesheet>

Then, whenever you want to output a newline (perhaps in csv) you can output something like the following:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(elem1,elem2,elem3,$newline)" />

I've used this technique when outputting sql from xml input. In fact, I tend to create variables for commas, quotes and newlines.

Hit answered 7/4, 2009 at 8:58 Comment(3)

Please note that Florjon's answer below is considerably more stable than mine. – Hit 9/12, 2013 at 21:51

It's probably worth adding the declaration xml:space="preserve" to the xsl:text element for increased stability, but I'd agree that @Florjon's answer is probably safer. – August 3/2, 2014 at 12:38

This solution has the drawback of also including any indentation, which may not be desirable. – Gathering 6/7, 2015 at 15:43

B

48

Include the attribute Method="text" on the xsl:output tag and include newlines in your literal content in the XSL at the appropriate points. If you prefer to keep the source code of your XSL tidy use the entity 
 where you want a new line.

Berkman answered 6/4, 2009 at 21:7 Comment(0)

P

35

You can use: <xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

see the example

<xsl:variable name="module-info">
  <xsl:value-of select="@name" /> = <xsl:value-of select="@rev" />
  <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
</xsl:variable>

if you write this in file e.g.

<redirect:write file="temp.prop" append="true">
  <xsl:value-of select="$module-info" />
</redirect:write>

this variable will produce a new line infile as:

commons-dbcp_commons-dbcp = 1.2.2
junit_junit = 4.4
org.easymock_easymock = 2.4

Planarian answered 4/8, 2011 at 11:56 Comment(0)

S

8

You can try,

<xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text>

It will work.

Searles answered 27/7, 2018 at 13:48 Comment(0)

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7

IMHO no more info than @Florjon gave is needed. Maybe some small details are left to understand why it might not work for us sometimes.

First of all, the &#xa (hex) or &#10 (dec) inside a <xsl:text/> will always work, but you may not see it.

There is no newline in a HTML markup. Using a simple <br/> will do fine. Otherwise you'll see a white space. Viewing the source from the browser will tell you what really happened. However, there are cases you expect this behaviour, especially if the consumer is not directly a browser. For instance, you want to create an HTML page and view its structure formatted nicely with empty lines and idents before serving it to the browser.
Remember where you need to use disable-output-escaping and where you don't. Take the following example where I had to create an xml from another and declare its DTD from a stylesheet.

The first version does escape the characters (default for xsl:text)

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" encoding="utf-8"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text>&lt;!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd"&gt;&#xa;&#xa;&#xd;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="*" mode="copy"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="@*|node()" mode="copy">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()" mode="copy"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

and here is the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
&lt;!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd"&gt;

&#13;<Subscriptions>
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

Ok, it does what we expect, escaping is done so that the characters we used are displayed properly. The XML part formatting inside the root node is handled by ident="yes". But with a closer look we see that the newline character &#xa was not escaped and translated as is, performing a double linefeed! I don't have an explanation on this, will be good to know. Anyone?

The second version does not escape the characters so they're producing what they're meant for. The change made was:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd"&gt;&#xa;&#xa;&#xd;</xsl:text>

and here is the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">

<Subscriptions>
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

and that will be ok. Both cr and lf are properly rendered.

Don't forget we're talking about nl, not crlf (nl=lf). My first attempt was to use only cr:&#xd and while the output xml was validated by DOM properly.

I was viewing a corrupted xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Subscriptions>riptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

DOM parser disregarded control characters but the rendered didn't. I spent quite some time bumping my head before I realised how silly I was not seeing this!

For the record, I do use a variable inside the body with both CRLF just to be 100% sure it will work everywhere.

Fetching answered 29/4, 2017 at 7:53 Comment(0)

K

4

I added the DOCTYPE directive you see here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY nl "&#xa;">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/query-test-XQTSCatalog"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                version="2.0">

This allows me to use &nl; instead of 
 to produce a newline in the output. Like other solutions, this is typically placed inside a <xsl:text> tag.

Kumquat answered 18/7, 2014 at 18:54 Comment(0)

G

2

I second Nic Gibson's method, this was always my favorite:

<xsl:variable name='nl'><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

However I have been using the Ant task <echoxml> to create stylesheets and run them against files. The task will do attribute value templates, e.g. ${DSTAMP} , but is also will reformat your xml, so in some cases, the entity reference is preferable.

<xsl:variable name='nl'><xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

Geraldina answered 28/10, 2011 at 5:56 Comment(1)

If you use a variable it would be better to use select instead of xsl:text. Example: <xsl:variable name="nl" select="'
'"/> That way you don't create an unnecessary RTF (result tree fragment). – Fabulist 20/8, 2013 at 14:50

W

2

I have found a difference between literal newlines in <xsl:text> and literal newlines using 
.

While literal newlines worked fine in my environment (using both Saxon and the default Java XSLT processor) my code failed when it was executed by another group running in a .NET environment.

Changing to entities (
) got my file generation code running consistently on both Java and .NET.

Also, literal newlines are vulnerable to being reformatted by IDEs and can inadvertently get lost when the file is maintained by someone 'not in the know'.

Warm answered 28/10, 2013 at 15:50 Comment(0)

A

2

I've noticed from my experience that producing a new line INSIDE a <xsl:variable> clause doesn't work. I was trying to do something like:

<xsl:variable name="myVar">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myValue" />
      <xsl:text></xsl:text> <!--NEW LINE-->
      <xsl:text>My other value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myOtherValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<div>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar"/>
</div>

Anything I tried to put in that "new line" (the empty <xsl:text> node) just didn't work (including most of the simpler suggestions in this page), not to mention the fact that HTML just won't work there, so eventually I had to split it to 2 variables, call them outside the <xsl:variable> scope and put a simple <br/> between them, i.e:

<xsl:variable name="myVar1">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="myVar2">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My other value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myOtherValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<div>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar1"/>
  <br/>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar2"/>
</div>

Yeah, I know, it's not the most sophisticated solution but it works, just sharing my ~~frustration~~ experience with XSLs ;)

Aeromarine answered 7/10, 2014 at 7:36 Comment(0)

D

2

I couldn't just use the <xsl:text>
</xsl:text> approach because if I format the XML file using XSLT the entity will disappear. So I had to use a slightly more round about approach using variables

<xsl:variable name="nl" select="'&#10;'"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:value-of select="$nl" disable-output-escaping="no"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
</xsl:template>

Diverting answered 29/4, 2015 at 14:55 Comment(0)

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1

<xsl:text xml:space="preserve">
</xsl:text>

Exemplification answered 13/7, 2021 at 9:31 Comment(0)

G

-7

just add this tag:

<br/>

it works for me ;) .

Goodrum answered 20/8, 2013 at 12:46 Comment(2)

The question is about text output. Your solution would only work if the output was rendered as HTML. – Hyla 20/8, 2013 at 14:43

Its not HTML formatting question – Redbreast 11/1 at 6:7

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