Saxon Documentation

Full Contents

About Saxon

Changes in this Release

Licensing

Using XSLT 2.0

Using XQuery

Handling Source Documents

XML Schema Processing

XPath API for Java

Saxon on .NET

Extensibility

Saxon Extensions
	Introduction
	EXSLT Extensions
	Extension attributes (XSLT only)
»	Additional serialization parameters
	Extension functions
	Extension instructions

Sample Saxon Applications

The Saxon SQL Extension

XSLT Elements

XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax

Function Library

Standards Conformance

The saxon:character-representation attribute

This attribute allows greater control over how non-ASCII characters will be represented on output.

With method="xml", two values are supported: "decimal" and "hex". These control whether numeric character references are output in decimal or hexadecimal when the character is not available in the selected encoding.

With HTML, the value may hold two strings, separated by a semicolon. The first string defines how non-ASCII characters within the character encoding will be represented, the values being "native", "entity", "decimal", or "hex". The second string defines how characters outside the encoding will be represented, the values being "entity", "decimal", or "hex". Here "native" means output the character as itself; "entity" means use a defined entity reference (such as "é") if known; "decimal" and "hex" refer to numeric character references. For example "entity;decimal" (the default) means that with encoding="iso-8859-1", characters in the range 160-255 will be represented using standard HTML entity references, while Unicode characters above 255 will be represented as decimal character references.

This attribute is retained for the time being in the interests of backwards compatibility. However, the latest XSLT 2.0 specification makes it technically a non-conformance to provide attributes that change serialization behavior except in cases where the behavior is implementation-defined; and this is not such a case (the specification, at least in the case of the XML output method, does not allow a character to be substituted with a character reference in cases where the character is present in the chosen encoding. The best way of ensuring that non-ASCII characters are output using character references is to use encoding="us-ascii".