Nifty tidbits

Nifty tidbits and random thoughts on technology and anything else that catches my fancy

Archive for January, 2005

  in XSLT - MSXML3, MSXML4

Posted by Raghu on January 28, 2005

I had this problem last week - needed to generate . My method was to use an entity declaration


<?xml version="1.0"?>
 <!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
    <!ENTITY nbsp " ">   <!-- white space in XSL -->
    ]>



Sadly, this doesn’t work with MSXML3 or MSXML4. The generated HTML has a space ‘ ‘ character rather than

After some googling, found the answer and a workaround on the xsl list

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Editing XSLT

Posted by Raghu on January 28, 2005

Am back on XML/XSL now. I’m in need of a good XSL editor - good being defined as

1. Support intellisense

2. Have a decent XPATH visualizer

3. Debugging (optional)

4. FREE :))

5. Editor with regexp support for search/replace (We all write XHTML. But if you need to start of with an existing HTML page, 99 times out of hundered, its not going to be XHTML)

I’ve been using Marrowsoft’s Xselerator for the past week. The XSL editor is great, other than for a couple of problems

1. Long lines - tends to get the editor confused.

2. Search/replace - Search/Replace dialogs are hard to handle.

3. 15 day trial version - so I’m soon going to be left without an editor.

Plus points are

1. Good XPath visualizer

2. Support for stylesheet params

Sadly, VS.NET lacks intellisense for XSLT files. However, there’s a workaround found on Fesersoft’s site

It works quite well. Plus you get VS.NET’s regexp search and replace. I’m using XSLDebugger for Xpath visualization. It’s a free download, though no longer supported. I guess my troubles will start when I have xsl stylesheet parameters where I’ll have to live with default parameters values.

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