"Unwrap" CDATA with XSLT

Question

Hi,
I know this isn't necessarily a FrameMaker question, but it is a place where I know people. So forgive me for asking it here.
I have some CDATA sections in an XML file that contain markup that I want to be parsed eventually, and I want to be able to extract it with the markup intact. Can I do this with XSLT, or does the nature of CDATA negate the use of retrieving the markup with an XML-parser-dependent technology?
Here's a sample element (element tags replaced with curly braces)
{documentation}{![CDATA[{p}Some text{/p}]]}{/documentation}
Is there any way I can get that p element out of there with XSLT, without excaping any of the characters, so it is parsable markup in the output?
[{p}Some text{/p}
Thanks,
Russ

Answer 1

Russ,
Two XSLT 1.0 attributes that might allow you to accomplish what you want are:
<xsl:output cdata-section-elements="documentation">
This XSLT element tells the XSLT processor to always output text nodes within documentation elements as CDATA sections. Hence, with this
<xsl:output> element and the template:
<xsl:template match="documentation">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template
your original example would be output as itself:
<documentation><![CDATA[<p>Some text</p>]]></documentation>
It gets more complicated if you want to illustrate CDATA sections in your documentation element.
<xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes">
tells the processor to output those special characters that are interpreted by an XML parser as themselves instead of as one of the XML representations of those characters. Thus, you can try:
<xsl:template match="documentation">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="."/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template
--Lynne