[xslt] Passing xml expressions as parameters.

["Bob Stobie" <bstobie axsone com>]

Hi All,

I have raised this before, and it applies to the now one release old
versions of libXML2 and libXSLT.

I have a moderately large XSLT application (the xsl file > 4500 lines) which
has been running under Windows with a MS Scripting engine driver written in
JScript.  The script calls the translation in an interative fashion.  I am
converting it to Perl to run on Linux/Solaris.

The author elected to pass an XML expression containing run time data as a
parameter to the XSLT.  I have found that the XML control characters, <, >,
" get escaped to &lt;, &gt; etc. before they they are processed in the
translation.  This happens whether I enclose the XML string is quotes or
not.  As a result, the XPath expressions to retrieve these values do not
work.

To make sure this was not an artifact of the Perl wrapper, I modified the
CPAN c code immediately before it calls xsltApplyStyleSheet to log the
parameter string it is passing.  At that point it is OK.  I have traced the
calls in the libXSLT code as far back as xmlXPathCompiledEval, which appears
to be in the core LibXML2 code, and up to that point I cannot see anything
that would do this.

Basically, is this a feature?  If so, is there anything I can do to disable
this?

Creating a very simple test case I pass in

		<state sequence="0"><info/><action
name="start"/><result><shellArgs/></result><notify/></state>

The parameter I pass in is

		<abcd>ABCD</abcd>

The style sheet is

		<?xml version="1.0"?>
		<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
version="1.0">

 		 <xsl:param name="maConfig"/>

 		 <xsl:template match="/">
 		   <xsl:copy-of select="." />
 		   <xsl:copy-of select="$maConfig" />
		  </xsl:template>

		</xsl:stylesheet>

The log result I get from my fprintf statement immediately before the call
to  xsltApplyStyleSheet is

		Parameter is '<abcd>ABCD</abcd>'

>From Perl, printing out the result of the translation I get

		<?xml version="1.0"?>
		<state sequence="0"><info/><action
name="start"/><result><shellArgs/></result><notify/></state>
		&lt;abcd&gt;ABCD&lt;/abcd&gt;

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Bob Stobie
bstobie axsone com