[thelist] XSLT search and replace Regex and escaping Special Characters...

[Mozer, Matt]

I am trying to do a search and replace on an element with a regex. The
problem I am having is on the replace. I am looking for any http(s) strings
and needing to create an href out of it.

The syntax looks like...

 

<xsl:template match="whatever">

 <xsl:copy>

<xsl:value-of select='replace(.,"(https?:\/\/[^\s]*)", "<a
href=$1>$1</a>")'/>  

 </xsl:copy>

</xsl:template>

 

I can't figure out how to escape the "<" & ">" characters... I have tried a
number of different ways... \<; &gt and &lt; <![CDATA[ ]>;  hex equivalent
and putting the select inside an <xsl:element name="a"> - Nothing has worked
and all of the examples I have seen don't give me exactly what I need.
Unfortunately, escaping the <> doesn't work since the XML parser won't
decode it, the browswer will instead so It just prints out a href on the
page.

 

Anyone better than me with XSLT? :-)

 

Thank you.