Summary This example demonstrates how to replace carriage returns with a break
in XSLT. It is also a generic template for handling any search and replace.

This example explains how to replace a carriage return with a break (<br />) in XSLT, so that the carriage return is preserved in a paragraph (<p>) in the HTML output.

In my XML example I have the following text in a CDATA section:

If I want to output this information in a <p> element (as I don't want to use a <pre>), the output of my example will be:

This displays many rows that we want to output. The carriage return needs to be replaced in this example.

All my carriage returns are lost!

When I first tackled this problem I was looking at the XPath translate() function solution.  But because the special character for a carriage return is &#10;, I actually need to do a replace of a word and not just a character.

So this example shows how you can replace the &#10; with a <br />.  This is an example of recursions where the template 'normalize-text' is called over and over inside of itself as it iterates through each word in the para.  If a carriage return is found, does the <br /> replace.

To achieve this replace I've used:

<xsl:value-of select=substring-before($text, $replace)/>
<xsl:value-of select=$by disable-output-escaping=yes/>

The attribute 'disable-output-escaping' tells the XSL processor to not escape any special characters, but to output exactly what is in the text node.

Additional information

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="blurb"> <p><b>Example 1: Text is normalized</b> <br /> <xsl:call-template name="replace-text"> <xsl:with-param name="text" select="info"/> <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="' '"/> <xsl:with-param name="by" select="'<br />'"/> </xsl:call-template> </p> <p><b>Example 2: Text is not normalized</b> <br /> <xsl:value-of select="info" /> </p> </xsl:template> <!-- template that does a search & replace --> <xsl:template name="replace-text"> <xsl:param name="text"/> <xsl:param name="replace" /> <xsl:param name="by" /> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="contains($text, $replace)"> <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, $replace)"/> <xsl:value-of select="$by" disable-output-escaping="yes"/> <xsl:call-template name="replace-text"> <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, $replace)"/> <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="$replace" /> <xsl:with-param name="by" select="$by" /> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:value-of select="$text"/> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet>