Special Characters in HTML Element - html

Question

What I'm trying to do is output a percent sign (%) directly into a < td > tag. Below is my code:
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td class="item_container" %%=v(#Item_Container_Style)=%%>
...
When I test the XSL I get the following error:
SAXParseException: Expected an attribute name (Set_A_Custom.xsl, line 205, column 38)
So basically it's seeing "%%=v(#Item_Container_Style)=%%" as invalid HTML but I need this code to be there.
If you are wondering why I am doing this it is because I am writing the XSL to output HTML that contains AMPscript (An ExactTarget proprietary Scripting language). You don't need to know anything about AMPscript though to help me out though, I just need to output the percent sign (%) in the HTML and everything will work.
Any ideas? For the record I'm using XSL 1.0. Thanks all!

Answer 1

An XSLT stylesheet must itself be well-formed XML, so you can't include this kind of construct directly in the stylesheet. If the XSLT processor you're using supports disable-output-escaping then you would be able to do something like
<table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[<td class="item_container" %%=v(#Item_Container_Style)=%%>]]></xsl:text>
...
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><![CDATA[</td>]]></xsl:text>
</tr>
</table>
If it does not allow disable-output-escaping then your only option is to use the text output method, and write all the tags you want to output as text with the angle brackets escaped (or in CDATA).

Answer 2

What I'm trying to do is output a percent sign (%) directly into a <td> tag.
Not possible with the "html" or "xml" output modes. XSLT has been designed to create syntactically sane HTML, you cannot make it do anything else.
Of course you could switch to the "text" output mode and do whatever you like, but generating HTML this way it a lot harder.
Alternatively you can use disable-output-escaping, if your XSLT processor supports it, but this will quickly degenerate your XSLT stylesheet into a mess if you need to do it in many places.
That being said, here's a proposal. In XSLT you use the "html" output mode and this:
<td
class="item_container"
amp-1="%%=v({#Item_Container_Style})%%"
amp-2="%%=v({#Some_Other_Element})%%"
>
some text %%=v(<xsl:value-of select="Other_Stuff" />)%% more text
</td>
That is syntactically valid XSLT which covers both cases (multiple placeholders in attributes, multiple placeholders in the text) and creates syntactically valid HTML:
<td
class="item_container"
amp-1="%%=v(item container style content)%%"
amp-2="%%=v(some other element content)%%"
>
Here some text %%=v(other stuff)%%
</td>
and then you use a post-processing step to convert that HTML into AMPscript:
Regex-replace \bamp-\d+="(%%[\s\S]*?%%)" with $1, which would result in
<td
class="item_container"
%%=v(item container style content)%%
%%=v(some other element content)%%
>
Here some text %%=v(other stuff)%%
</td>
Handling HTML with regular expressions is generally strongly dis-recommended, but this might just be a narrow-enough use case.

Answer 3

AMPScript appears to have a standards-based syntax as an alternative to its proprietary syntax:
Delimiter Comparison
The table below demonstrates the similarities between standard AMPscript delimiters and server-side delimiters.
Standard AMPscript Delimiter Tag-based AMPscript Delimiter
%%[ <script runat=server language=ampscript>
etc
Does this help you?