[xslt] Entities translation

[ben <nicolas marsgui libertysurf fr>]

Hi,
I've seen that in the stylesheets that I use a lot of time is spent in
translating from the source document text some entities (  &
etc.) to the expected final format. Until now the basic string functions
are used (contains, substring-{before|after}, etc.) and it is not
optimized at all.

My question is: what should I do to systematically convert in a text an
entity to a predefined string?

I thought about using the translate() fonction, but you can only map a
character to another one. I think about using EXSLT functions like
regexp:replace(), but I don't know if it's the right way and if it is
possible to do it with xsltproc.

Thanks for any suggestion!
BG