How to implement Carriage return in XSLT

Question

I want to implement carriage return within xslt. The problem is I have a varible: Step 1 = Value 1 breaktag Step 2 = Value 2 as a string and would like to appear as

Step 1 = Value 1

Step 2 = Value 2

in the HTML form but I am getting the br tag on the page.Any good ways of implementing a line feed/carriage return in xsl would be appreciated

Answer 1

As an alternative to

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

you could use

<xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text> <!-- newline character -->

or

<xsl:text>&#13;</xsl:text> <!-- carriage return character -->

in case you don't want to mess up your indentation

Answer 2

This works for me, as carriage-return + life feed.

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

The "
" string does not work.

Answer 3

use a simple carriage return in a xsl:text element

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

Answer 4

Try this at the end of the line where you want the carriage return. It worked for me.

<xsl:text><![CDATA[<br />]]></xsl:text>

Answer 5

I was looking for a nice solution to this, as many would prefer, without embedding escape sequences directly in the expressions, or having weird line breaks inside of a variable. I found a hybrid of both this approaches actually works, by embedding a text node inside a variable like this:

<xsl:variable name="newline"><xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text></xsl:variable>
<xsl:value select="concat(some_element, $newline)" />

Another nice side-affect of this is that you can pass in whatever newline you want, be it just LF, CR, or both CRLF.

--Daniel

Answer 6

The cleanest way I've found is to insert !ENTITY declarations at the top of the stylesheet for newline, tab, and other common text constructs. When having to insert a slew of formatting elements into your output this makes the transform sheet look much cleaner.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
    <!ENTITY nl "<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:template match="step">
    &nl;&nl;
    <xsl:apply-templates  />
  </xsl:template>

...

Answer 7

Here is an approach that uses a recursive template, which looks for 
 in the string from the database and then outputs the substring before. If there is a substring after 
 remaining, then the template calls itself until there is nothing left. In case 
 is not present then the text is simply output.

Here is the template call (just replace @ActivityExtDescription with your database field):

<xsl:call-template name="MultilineTextOutput">
    <xsl:with-param name="text" select="@ActivityExtDescription" />
</xsl:call-template>

and here is the code for the template itself:

<xsl:template name="MultilineTextOutput">
<xsl:param name="text"/>
<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="contains($text, '&#10;')">
        <xsl:variable name="text-before-first-break">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '&#10;')" />
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="text-after-first-break">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($text, '&#10;')" />
        </xsl:variable>

        <xsl:if test="not($text-before-first-break = '')">
            <xsl:value-of select="$text-before-first-break" /><br />
        </xsl:if>

        <xsl:if test="not($text-after-first-break = '')">
            <xsl:call-template name="MultilineTextOutput">
                <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$text-after-first-break" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$text" /><br />
    </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Works like a charm!!!

Answer 8

I believe that you can use the xsl:text tag for this, as in

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

Chances are that by putting the closing tag on a line of its own, the newline is part of the literal text and outputted as such.

Answer 9

I separated the values by Environment.NewLine and then used a pre tag in html to emulate the effect I was looking for

Answer 10

This is the only solution that worked for me. Except I was replacing 
 with \r\n