> input: <p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t always get what you 
> want&#8230;&#8221;</p>
> 
> output: <p>"You can't always get what you want."</p>
> 
> I would like the text content of the output to exactly match 
> the content of the input.

You can't always get what you want ;-)

Saxon doesn't know that the original document contained numeric character
references - it only sees what the parser hands over, which is Unicode
characters. You can force the characters to be output as numeric character
references by using a character encoding in which they aren't present, for
example <xsl:output encoding="iso-8859-1"/>, but they won't necessarily be
exactly the same as in the input.

>   <xsl:value-of select="text()" disable-output-escaping="yes"/>

Don't use d-o-e unless you know the consequences (I think you don't).

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