Inserting a line break in a PDF generated from XSL FO using <xsl:value-of>

Question

I am using XSL FO to generate a PDF file containing a table with information. One of these columns is a "Description" column. An example of a string that I am populating one of these Description fields with is as follows:

This is an example Description.<br/>List item 1<br/>List item 2<br/>List item 3<br/>List item 4 

Inside the table cell that corresponds to this Description, I would like the output to display as such:

This is an example Description. List item 1 List item 2 List item 3 List item 4 

I've learned from searching elsewhere that you can make line breaks in XSL FO using an <fo:block></fo:block> within another <fo:block> element. Therefore, even before I parse the XML with my XSL stylesheet, I replace all occurrences of <br/> with <fo:block/>, so that the literal value of the string now looks like:

This is an example Description.<fo:block/>List item 1<fo:block/>List item 2<fo:block/>List item 3<fo:block/>List item 4 

The problem arises when the Description string I am using is obtained using <xsl:value-of>, example as follows:

<fo:block>     <xsl:value-of select="descriptionStr"/> </fo:block> 

In which case, the value that gets output to my PDF document is the literal value, so it looks exactly like the previous example with all the <fo:block/> literals. I've tried manually hard-coding the <fo:block/> in the middle of another string, and it displays correctly. E.g. if I write inside my stylesheet:

<fo:block>Te<fo:block/>st</fo:block> 

It will display correctly as:

Te st 

But this does not seem to happen when the <fo:block/> is inside the value of an <xsl:value-of select=""/> statement. I've tried searching for this on SO as well as Google, etc. to no avail. Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

You could also replace <br/> with 
 and add a linefeed-treatment="preserve" attribute to your <fo:block>.

Something like:

<fo:block linefeed-treatment="preserve">This is an example Description.&#xA;List item 1&#xA;List item 2&#xA;List item 3&#xA;List item 4</fo:block> 

Edit

Some users may need to use \n instead of 
 depending on how they are creating the XML. See Retain the &#xA; during xml marshalling for more details.

Answer 2

This helped me and should be simplest solution (working with Apache FOP 1.1):

Why not replace your <br/> with Unicode character called line separator.

   <xsl:template match="br">       <xsl:value-of select="'&#x2028;'"/>    </xsl:template> 

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline#Unicode