Mike West — Web Application Developer

Escaping Curly Braces in XSLT Attributes

For future reference:

Curly braces in the attributes of XSLT document’s elements are interpreted as XPATH expressions to be evaluated. This, generally, is fine: I like shortcuts. I don’t, however, like them when they interfere with my ability to embed JavaScript hacks into a document.

You may be thinking to yourself: “Mike, you shouldn’t embed JavaScript into an element’s attributes! That’s simply idiotic!” You’d be right, of course. But assume for the moment that I had a good reason for doing it (in this particular case, the link simply doesn’t work at all without JavaScript. which is also bad. but something I can’t do anything about right now. don’t do this at home, kids.). In that obscure case, I’d need to remember to set the attribute via the magical <xsl:attribute> element.

<a>
    <xsl:attribute name="href">
        http://curlyquotes.com/i/can/use/{/and/}/yay!/
    </xsl:attribute>
</a>

Now you know. And now I’ll be able to look this up in a few weeks when I have no idea what my code’s doing. :)

Also: I hate XSLT.

• Posted: 15. June 2007