I think you should be able to achieve this by selecting iso-8859-1 as the
encoding, and using a character map that forces NBSP to be output as  ,
and similarly for all other characters that you want output as numeric
references.

With HTML output, Saxon has an option (saxon:character-representation - see
http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/extensions/output-extras.html ) that
forces non-ASCII characters to be represented as character references, but
(a) it applies to all non-ASCII characters, and (b) it doesn't work for XML
output.

If you're really determined then you could write your own serializer by
subclassing Saxon's XMLEmitter; you would only need to override one method.

Michael Kay

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Welch [mailto:ajwelch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 22 June 2004 09:49
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE:  Output character references for all but 
> one character
> 
> 
> 
> > > I have the problem where I need characters outside the ascii
> > > range to be output as references, apart from the pound sign, 
> > > which must remain as the actual character.
> > 
> > I don't understand. You want the output to be ASCII, but you 
> > want the # sign output as a hex A3 byte? Those are surely 
> > contradictory requirements.
> 
> Long story, I doubt there's a solution (as it's a daft 
> requirement) but here are the requirements, maybe xslt 2.0 
> can help me out here:
> 
> This xml:
> 
> <node value="£">Hello&#160;World</node>
> 
> Once transformed, looks the same:
> 
> <node value="£">Hello&#160;World</node>
> 
> That is, the non-breaking-space appears as a character 
> reference, and the pound sign appears as the actual character.
> 
> I've tried various combinations of output encodings, d-o-e 
> and character maps, but I haven't be able to do it so far.  
> How would character maps replace d-o-e on attributes here?  
> Maybe a 'force-output-escaping' would be useful, as it does 
> come up on the list now and again where the answer is to 
> specify an encoding that doesn't contain the character you 
> need in order to force the serialiser to escape it?
> 
> cheers
> andrew
> 
> 
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