Perhaps ask the customers what there actual requirements are, and 
indicate that a "CDATA Preserving XSLT Implementation" does not exist so 
you would have to write your own. 
Ask how much they would be willing to pay for that behavior, and quote 
them an estimate for writing one from scratch.
Encourage them to get bids from other software companies to do the same.

Then when the dust settles come back and ask them again if that was 
really a requirement.

David A. Lee
dlee@c...  
http://www.calldei.com
http://www.xmlsh.org
812-482-5224



michael odling-smee wrote:
> Thanks David,
>
> Yes I am aware of the cdata-section-elements XSLT attribute however it 
> does not really solve my problem - about 5% of the elements in the 
> source document are <value/> elements not all of which contain CDATA. 
> If we added new CDATA sections to the output this would probably not 
> satisfy the customer either.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Michael
>
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM, David Carlisle <davidc@n... 
> <mailto:davidc@n...>> wrote:
>
>
>
>     > wondering whether anyone could point me to the relevant place which
>     > specifies that this is expected behaviour of the parser/xslt
>     > processor.
>
>     The XSLT engine has no information about whether CDATA was used so
>     when
>     it linearises the tree it just does whatever it does, it has to
>     quote <
>     somehow, but it is free to use cdtat sections or numeric or entity
>     references. This is exactly the same as using ' or " around attribute
>     values, the XSLT engine can not preserve those either: it will most
>     likely always use ".
>
>     What you can do is tell the XSLT engine to always use CDATA
>     sections for
>     those elements add cdata-section-elements="value" to the xslt
>     stylesheet.
>
>     David
>
>
>
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