XSLT - showing HTML tags from RSS feeds

feenster99 · 18 Jul 2007 at 18:51

Hi all,
I'm just experimenting with XSLT for the first time today. I'm trying to take an RSS feed, and display it to the screen - I've got that bit working fine.

However, i'm falling over when it comes to displaying HTML that is embedded in the RSS feed properly. For example, the description of the article has tags in. This seems to be being converted into HTML entities. How can I stop this, and display it as HTML?

Cheers,
Matt

JIMA · 18 Jul 2007 at 19:13

Hi,

Can you catch the element in a template? You can then output something else instead of these tags e.g

Code:

<xsl:template match='strong'>
    <xsl:value-of select="."/>
</template>

Or something like that anyway.

Jim

psyr33n · 18 Jul 2007 at 20:29

I take it the tags are contained as CDATA inside of the main feed post bodies?

feenster99 · 18 Jul 2007 at 22:14

Here's an example feed i'm trying to parse:
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/rss/Press.rss

Bit new to XSLT, so not too sure what CDATA is

Matt

Eriedor · 18 Jul 2007 at 22:19

CDATA means what is inside the braces will be ignored by the parser, basically it is used to wrap an elements text that has illegal characters such as & and <.

The feed has cdata'd the tags so that the rss output your end will echo them out and display the text in bold, rather than interpretting the strong tags as xml elements. If you don't want the text to be bold you will have to strip out the strong tags from the cdata elements.

Hope this clarifies.

feenster99 · 18 Jul 2007 at 22:25

Hi,
Thanks for that - that does clear it up.

The main feed I was looking at was this one:
http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/rss/status.rss

This is the one that has the HTML done as entities instead of tags. Why would they have done this?

Cheers,
Matt

Eriedor · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:04

That one will yield the same result as the first.

Instead of using CDATA to escape illegal characters it has replaced the "<" and ">" part of html tags with legal equivelants "<" (less than) and ">". When this is rendered they will be replaced with < and > respectively.

feenster99 · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:07

So is there any way to replace the entities with the correct characters so it will render as proper HTML on-screen?

Matt