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using xslproc to output not well formed xml

23 July 2007 - 2:30pm — abate

After few attempt with cduce, in the end I resorted to xslt to convert the cduce manual to a more drupal-friendly format.

Drupal uses the geshi filter to do syntax highlighting. The problem with this filter is that it does not understand CDATA sections and its input is not well-formed xml.

The cduce manual is written in a well-formed xml and uses CDATA sections for cduce code. For example:

<sample><![CDATA[
let f (x : Int) : Int = g x
let g (x : Int) : Int  = x + 1
]]></sample>

My problem was to remove the cdata declaration and output something of the form:

<blockcode>
let f (x : Int) : Int = g x
let g (x : Int) : Int  = x + 1
</blockcode>

After a bit of document reading and research this was my solution:

    <xsl:template name="normalize">
        <xsl:param name="input"/>
        <xsl:param name="mode">normal</xsl:param>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="$mode = 'escape'">
                <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$input"/>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:value-of select="$input"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>

This template is effectively a function that is invoked with two parameters input and mode.

Input contains the text to be printed, while the mode is a boolean to decide whether to encode the input or not. Using <xsl:copy-of ... or xsl:text... with disable-output-escaping does not give the same result.

I'm not sure if this is a bug/feature or xsltproc or something written in the xslt standard.

The function to invoke the above function is as follows:

    <xsl:template match="sample">
        <blockcode lang="ocaml">
            <xsl:call-template name="normalize">
                <xsl:with-param name="input">
                    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
                </xsl:with-param>
                <xsl:with-param name="mode">escape</xsl:with-param>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </blockcode>
    </xsl:template>

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