You can do it with character maps but you don't need to do anything as messy
as that. You want an attribute containing the Unicode character with code
point xE003 (= decimal 57347), so write

<xsl:attribute name="unicode" select="codepoints-to-string(57347)"/>

and let the serializer do its job of serializing it: that's what it's good
at.

Regards,

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



> -----Original Message-----
> From: tom a [mailto:tasmito@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 05 August 2009 22:00
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  outputting an ampersand in an attribute
>
> I am generating svg documents and would like to output an
> element like:
>
> <glyph unicode="&#xE003;" horiz-adv-x="833"
> d="M124,348L124,249L709,249L709,348L124,348 Z"/>
>
> I need to generate the value of @unicode programmatically.
> The difficulty, of course, is outputting the ampersand in @unicode.
>
> I started off by trying to disable output escaping:
>
> <xsl:variable name="char" as="xs:string">
>   <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes"
>       select="concat(codepoints-to-string(38), position(), ';')"/>
>  </xsl:variable>
> <xsl:attribute name="unicode" select="$char"/>
>
> But this came out as &amp;
> (followed by an integer and ; per the concat())
>
> I then tried to use character maps:
>
> <xsl:character-map name="charmap">
>    <xsl:output-character string="&amp;" character="&"/>
> </xsl:character-map>
>
> But the processor refuses to accept the lone ampersand in
> @character. It generates the following message:
>
> "The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the
> entity reference."
>
> But since the entity name is generated at runtime, I have a problem.
>
> Any thoughts are greatly appreciated...
>
> Tom