Using an HTML entity in XSLT (e.g.  )

Question

What is the best way to include an html entity in XSLT?

<xsl:template match="/a/node">     <xsl:value-of select="."/>     <xsl:text>&nbsp;</xsl:text> </xsl:template> 

this one returns a XsltParseError

Answer 1

You can use CDATA section

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[&nbsp;]]></xsl:text> 

or you can describe &nbsp in local DTD:

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

or just use   instead of  

Answer 2

It is also possible to extend the approach from 2nd part of aku's answer and get all known character references available, 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>&nbsp;&minus;30&deg;</xsl:text> 

There is certain difference in the result as compared to <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> approach. The latter one 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.

It may be wise then 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.