How to insert in XSLT

Question

How can I insert

 

Into an XSLT stylesheet, I keep getting this error:

XML Parsing

Answer 1

Try to use

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

But it depends on XSLT processor you are using: the XSLT spec does not require XSLT processors to convert it into " ".

Answer 2

When you use the following (without disable-output-escaping!) you'll get a single non-breaking space:

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

Answer 3

Use this

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;</xsl:text>nbsp;

edit: Downvoters should probably validate that this works first (it does, and is the most general solution to the problem.)

Answer 4

In addition to victor hugo's answer it is possible to get all known character references legal in an XSLT file, like this:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY % w3centities-f PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Combined Set//EN//XML"
      "http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007/w3centities-f.ent">
  %w3centities-f;
]>
...
<xsl:text>&amp; &nbsp; &ndash;</xsl:text>

There is also certain difference in the result of this approach as compared to <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> one. The latter is going to produce string literals like   for all kinds of output, even for <xsl:output method="text">, and this may happen to be different from what you might wish... On the contrary, getting entities defined for XSLT template via <!DOCTYPE ... <!ENTITY ... will always produce output consistent with your xsl:output settings.

And when including all character references, it may be wise to use a local entity resolver to keep the XSLT engine from fetching character entity definitions from the Internet. JAXP or explicit Xalan-J users may need a patch for Xalan-J to use the resolver correctly. See my blog XSLT, entities, Java, Xalan... for patch download and comments.

Answer 5

Although answer has been already provided by @brabster and others.
I think more reusable solution would be:

<xsl:variable name="space">&#160;</xsl:variable>
...
<xsl:value-of select="$space"/>

Answer 6

You might want to add the definition for this entity in the beginning of the file (below xml declaration):

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp  "&#160;" >
]>

Also you can add more entities such as Ntilde, Aacute, etc.