[xslt] How to insert   in XSLT

How can I insert

 

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.

Try to use

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

But it depends on XSLT processor you are using: the XSLT spec does not require XSLT processors to convert it into " ".

When you use the following (without disable-output-escaping!) you'll get a single non-breaking space:

<xsl:text>&#160;</xsl:text>

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.

<br/>

In addition to victor hugo's answer it is possible to get all known character references legal in an XSLT file, like this:

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY % w3centities-f PUBLIC "-//W3C//ENTITIES Combined Set//EN//XML"
      "http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007/w3centities-f.ent">
  %w3centities-f;
]>
...
<xsl:text>&amp; &nbsp; &ndash;</xsl:text>

There is also certain difference in the result of this approach as compared to <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> one. The latter is going to produce string literals like   for all kinds of output, even for <xsl:output method="text">, and this may happen to be different from what you might wish... On the contrary, getting entities defined for XSLT template via <!DOCTYPE ... <!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.

  works really well. However, it will display one of those strange characters in ANSI encoding. <xsl:text> worked best for me.

<xsl:text> </xsl:text>

XSLT stylesheets must be well-formed XML. Since " " is not one of the five predefined XML entities, it cannot be directly included in the stylesheet. So coming back to your solution " " is a perfect replacement of " " you should use.

Example:

<xsl:value-of select="$txtFName"/>&#160;<xsl:value-of select="$txtLName"/>

One can also do this :

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[&nbsp;]]></xsl:text>

You might want to add the definition for this entity in the beginning of the file (below xml declaration):

<!DOCTYPE stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp  "&#160;" >
]>

Also you can add more entities such as Ntilde, Aacute, etc.

Although answer has been already provided by @brabster and others.
I think more reusable solution would be:

<xsl:variable name="space">&#160;</xsl:variable>
...
<xsl:value-of select="$space"/>

Use this

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;</xsl:text>nbsp;

edit: Downvoters should probably validate that this works first (it does, and is the most general solution to the problem.)

you can also use:

<xsl:value-of select="'&amp;nbsp'"/>

remember the amp after the & or you will get an error message