XSLT string with HTML entities - How can I get it to render as HTML?

Question

I'm completely new to using XSL, so if there's any information that I'm neglecting to include, just let me know.

I have a string in my XSLT file that I can display like this:

<xsl:value-of select="@Description/>

and it shows up, rendered in a browser like:

<div>I can't do anything about the html entities existing in the text.</div> <div>This includes quotes, like  &quot;Hello World&quot; and sometimes whitespaces.&nbsp;</div>

What can I do to get this string rendered as html, so that <div></div> results in newlines, " gives me ", and   gives me a space?

I could elaborate on things I've already tried that haven't worked, but I don't know if that's relevant.

Answer 1

I think you want to set the following attribute as so:

<xsl:value-of select="@Description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

Answer 2

Why do you need to have entities output? To the browser   is the same as   -- in both cases it will display a non-breaking space.

There is a feature in XSLT 2.0 called character-maps, that provide this functionality, if really needed. It is an XSLT best practice to try not to use DOE, unless absolutely necessary.

Also, DOE is not a mandatory feature of XSLT and some XSLT processors may not implement it. This means that an XSLT application that uses DOE is generally not portable across different XSLT processors.