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We have a PHP CMS with a lot of poorly written HTML in the client-contributed content. This kept causing my XSL template system to output XML errors. I got around this problem by:

1. wrapping content in CDATA tags
2. Checking if the content is valid XML with xml_parse() in PHP, if not I add a CDATA tag and try again.
3. Strip out bad characters that may have crept in from Word
4. Process the XSL and XML using xsl:value-of tags with disable-output-escaping=”yes”

Using CDATA tags around unpredictable HTML helps prevent problems with the XML parser. Without the final step, the resulting HTML …

Continue reading → | php, xslt, programming

Textile provides a simple way of writing human-friendly text that can easily be translated to XHTML. HTML tags are simplified into a set of phrase and block modifiers; even tables and attributes can be created.

I was looking at the PHP code for this and wondering if I could create an XSL file that could translate similar text into XHTML. I created some XML to contain my text:

And then used the following recursive algorithm to process it in XSLT:

...

Continue reading → | xslt, programming, snippets, tips, textile