I assume you are generating HTML, and what you really mean is that where
there is a new line in the XML, you want the text to show on a new line in
the browser? For that, it's not enough for the XSLT to preserve the line
breaks, it needs to convert them into <br> elements.

Like many string manipulation tasks this one is easiest using 2.0:

<xsl:analyze-string select="." regex="\n">
  <xsl:matching-substring><br/></xsl:matching-substring>
</

But it's not too hard in 1.0: google for "XSLT replace newline BR".

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Gay [mailto:jgay@xxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 20 October 2005 21:40
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  line breaks in XML data
> 
> forgive my novice ineptitude.
> 
> I am working on a project where we would like to preserve 
> line breaks  
> that are entered into our XML database.
> 
> We are doing our XSL transformations with version 1.
> If I use my XSLT to output/display this data into a <textarea>  
> element, the line breaks found in the database are there when 
> displayed.
> If I output to a simple <p> element, the line breaks are gone.
> 
> How can I keep the formatting when using a <p>?
> Can I use something like translate() to look for carriage return  
> characters?
> 
> I don't know what parser is being used for this application.
> 
> Thanks
> -Jim