Escape single quote in xslt concat function

Question

I want to output single quote around $ID variable in the below xsl:value-of xsl statment.

<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=',$ID,']')"></xsl:value-of>

currently it prints

process@Ref=87799989

How can I achieve this?

Byrne

Good Question (+1). See my answer for a complete solution. :) – Albumin

Good Question (and answered thankfully!) ; this was driving me nuts ! – Nolanolan

Answer 1

Use '?

<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=&apos;',$ID,'&apos;]')"></xsl:value-of>

Edit: See Dimitre's answer for a better solution.

Catamite

It's odd this worked; as ' should be decoded equivalent to a literal '. Perhaps a buggy XSLT engine? – Anibalanica

Yuo need to use both ' and the single quote together: '' – Hawkeyed

@Vadi - ' and the single quote doesn't seem to work for gmail filters but it worked without the single quote. – Rubierubiginous

@Vadi - Thanks a lot for that suggestion. I went crazy trying to escape it. – Ballard

Answer 2

In XPath 1.0:

You can use the built-in entities ' and "

In XSLT 1.0:

Alternatively, you can define your $Q and $APOS variables (put the content (the literal " or the literal ' character) in the body of the xsl:variable, not in the select attribute).

In XPath 2.x (this also means XSLT 2.x and XQuery 1.x)

Simply escape an apostrophe by entering two adjacent apostrophes, escape a quote by entering two adjacent quotes, as defined by the XPath 2.0 language

Albumin

Could you please provide examples? (one example tells more than 1000 words and pushes your answer to the top). Thanks – Numeral

@RichardGomes, See this: https://mcmap.net/q/330977/-xsl-escaping-an-apostrophe-during-xsl-when-test ,or this: https://mcmap.net/q/330978/-pass-href-dynamically-in-an-xml-file , or this: https://mcmap.net/q/330979/-concat-quotation-mark-and-apostrophe-combination-problems – Albumin

Answer 3

To expand on Dimitre's answer, you can use this solution in XSLT:

<xsl:variable name="apos">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="concat('process[@Ref=',$apos,$ID,$apos,']')"></xsl:value-of>

Fibrilliform

The variable method works and looks the most readable (IMHO). – Nolanolan

This is the second time that this solution has saved me wasting hours of trial and error and debugging time. – Kist

Seems to work in XSLT 1.0 and 2.0, which I liked because then I can put it into a common.xslt file. – Gravitate

Answer 4

<xsl:value-of
select="concat('process[@Ref=&apos;',$ID,'&apos;]')"></xsl:value-of>

this doesn't work for me. My solution is:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(&quot;process[@Ref='&quot;,$oidConstant,&quot;'&quot;)"></xsl:value-of>

Barranquilla

I was skeptical but this works - the plain text double quote contains the select statement and the encoded doubles are consumed by the parser - nice – Openhanded

Answer 5

Easy Example would be

      <xsl:variable name="varTitle" select="title" />
<xsl:variable name="APOS">'</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="translate($varTitle, 'any text', $APOS)"/>

This will replace "any text" with ' in my title.

Bracey

Answer 6

Instead of using concat(), you can do the string concatenation inside a variable assignment. That allows to write a simple, unescaped ' to mean ':

<xsl:variable name="process-selector">process[@Ref='<xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>']</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />

With the recommended way to allow linebreaks without accidentally adding whitespace to the output, this becomes quite lengthy (but that's XSL, right?):

<xsl:variable name="process-selector">
    <xsl:text>process[@Ref='</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>
    <xsl:text>']</xsl:text>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />

 

---

Full XSL file for this solution to test, for example with an online XSL-T service like xsltransform.net:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:transform xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
    <xsl:output method="html"/>

    <xsl:template match="/" name="strip-space" >
        <xsl:variable name="ID" select="123"/>
        <xsl:variable name="process-selector">
            <xsl:text>process[@Ref='</xsl:text>
            <xsl:value-of select="$ID"/>
            <xsl:text>']</xsl:text>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:value-of select="$process-selector" />
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:transform>

Micmac