How to insert nbsp in XSLT

Question

How can I insert      amp nbsp    Into an XSLT stylesheet  I keep getting this error      XML Parsing Error  undefined entity   Essentially I want a non breaking space character in the XSLT Template

User · Accepted Answer

Use the entity code  amp  160  instead    amp nbsp  is a HTML  character entity reference   There is no named entity for non-breaking space in XML  so you use the code  amp  160    Wikipedia includes a list of XML and HTML entities  and you can see that there are only 5  predefined entities  in XML  but HTML has over 200  I ll also point over to Creating a space   amp nbsp   in XSL which has excellent answers

User · Answer

amp  160  works really well  However  it will display one of those strange characters in ANSI encoding   lt xsl text gt  worked best for me    lt xsl text gt   lt  xsl text gt

User · Answer

You might want to add the definition for this entity in the beginning of the file  below xml declaration     lt  DOCTYPE stylesheet    lt  ENTITY nbsp    amp  160    gt    gt    Also you can add more entities such as Ntilde  Aacute  etc

User · Answer

One can also do this      lt xsl text disable-output-escaping  yes  gt  lt   CDATA  amp nbsp    gt  lt  xsl text gt

User · Answer

In addition to victor hugo s answer it is possible to get all known character references legal in an XSLT file  like this    lt  DOCTYPE stylesheet      lt  ENTITY   w3centities-f PUBLIC  -  W3C  ENTITIES Combined Set  EN  XML         http   www w3 org 2003 entities 2007 w3centities-f ent  gt     w3centities-f    gt       lt xsl text gt  amp amp   amp nbsp   amp ndash  lt  xsl text gt    There is also certain difference in the result of this approach as compared to  lt xsl text disable-output-escaping  yes  gt  one  The latter is going to produce string literals like  amp nbsp  for all kinds of output  even for  lt xsl output method  text  gt   and this may happen to be different from what you might wish    On the contrary  getting entities defined for XSLT template via  lt  DOCTYPE      lt  ENTITY     will always produce output consistent with your xsl output settings   And when including all character references  it may be wise to use a local entity resolver to keep the XSLT engine from fetching character entity definitions from the Internet  JAXP or explicit Xalan-J users may need a patch for Xalan-J to use the resolver correctly  See my blog XSLT  entities  Java  Xalan    for patch download and comments

User · Answer

Try to use    lt xsl text gt  amp  160  lt  xsl text gt    But it depends on XSLT processor you are using  the XSLT spec does not require XSLT processors to convert it into   amp nbsp

User · Answer

I was trying to display borders on an empty cell in an HTML table   My old trick of using non-breaking space in empty cells was not working from xslt   I used line break with the same effect   I mention this just in case the reason you were trying to use the non-breaking space was to give some content to an  empty  table cell in order to turn on the cell borders    lt br  gt

User · Answer

XSLT stylesheets must be well-formed XML  Since   amp nbsp   is not one of the five predefined XML entities  it cannot be directly included in the stylesheet  So coming back to your solution   amp  160   is a perfect replacement of   amp nbsp   you should use   Example     lt xsl value-of select   txtFName   gt  amp  160  lt xsl value-of select   txtLName   gt

User · Answer

Although answer has been already provided by  brabster and others  I think more reusable solution would be    lt xsl variable name  space  gt  amp  160  lt  xsl variable gt       lt xsl value-of select   space   gt

User · Answer

Use this   lt xsl text disable-output-escaping  yes  gt  amp amp  lt  xsl text gt nbsp    edit   Downvoters should probably validate that this works first  it does  and is the most general solution to the problem

User · Answer

When you use the following  without disable-output-escaping   you ll get a single non-breaking space    lt xsl text gt  amp  160  lt  xsl text gt

User · Answer

you can also use    lt xsl value-of select    amp amp nbsp    gt    remember the amp after the  amp  or you will get an error message

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