Replacing Ampersand character - &

Question

Hi All,
I am working on the PO Layout for Oracle Applications. I have managed to get the program to show long text notes associated with the purchase order lines. However some notes include ampersand characters.
I have no control over the generation of the data (as it is Oracle standard PO data definition) so I cannot replace it in the pl/sql.
I have tried using the replace function, but am struggling.
the following code contains my latest attempt, and also a commented out line which simply shows the text (works fine if the text has no & character) and another attempt I have made.
<!-- for long text -->
                    <xsl:for-each select="$LINE_LONG_ATTACHMENTS_ROOT_OBJ">
                    <!-- fo:block><fo:inline><xsl:value-of select ="TEXT"/> </fo:inline></fo:block-->
                         SHOW LINE LONG MSGS
                         <xsl:if test="$lineID = .">
                              <xsl:variable name="line" select="position()" />
                              <!-- fo:block><fo:inline xdofo:use-attribute-sets="i_61"><xsl:value-of select="../TEXT[$line]"/></fo:inline>     </fo:block><fo:block/ -->      
                              <fo:block><fo:inline xdofo:use-attribute-sets="i_61"><xsl:value-of select="replace(string(../TEXT[$line]), string('L'), string('M')) "/></fo:inline>     </fo:block><fo:block/>      
                              <!-- xsl:variable name="note_text" select="replace(string(xdoxslt:normalize_string($_XDOCTX, ../TEXT[$line])), string('L'), string('M'))"/>
<fo:block><fo:inline xdofo:use-attribute-sets="i_61">
                              <xsl:value-of select="$note_text"/ >
                              </fo:inline>     </fo:block><fo:block/-->
                         </xsl:if>
                    </xsl:for-each>
Currently my example tries to replace L with M as a test. Ideally I would like to replace & with &amps;
Thanks,
Will

Answer 1

Hi Will:
Unfortunately replacing & in XML is already too late - you don't have valid XML so you can't apply a stylesheet. If you could wrap a cdata section around your & you would be fine:
<![CDATA[" text "]]>
, but it seems that you can't modify the XML - so you are between a rock and a hard place.
Klaus