Line Breaks in Fields

[Zippy Aus]

Hi all

I have almost successfully moved my CDML pages to XSL, but I am still unable to get paragraph breaks in my fields. Do I have to use a substitute calculation or can I do it directly in the XSL page.

Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Stephen

[Martin Brändle]

There is a fmxslt extension function for this described on page 64 of the FMS7A Custom Web Publishing Guide.

Try:

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

e.g. where you have

<xsl:value-of select="XPath_to_your_field"/>, wrap the fmxslt:break_encode() function around it and add the attribute disable-output-escaping="yes"

In addition, you should add as namespace definition

xmlns:fmxslt="xalan://com.fmi.xslt.ExtensionFunctions"

to your <xsl:stylesheet ...> tag at the very top of your page, if not already done so.

[Zippy Aus]

Thanks Martin

That was exactly what I needed. One other quick one ... if I have used quotes ie. ' or " in the text field, they are appearing as ? (question marks) ... how can I avoid this?

Thanks again for your assistance. It is greatly appreciated.

Stephen

[Martin Brändle]

Do you use "smart" quotes in the field? (That's some FM setting in document preferences).

Maybe you try to following:

Change your first line in the XSLT file to

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

and

<xsl:output ...> to <xsl:output method="html" encoding="UTF-8"/>

and remove the

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> tag.

The transformation of the stylesheet then produces Unicode-8 format, a format that modern browsers should be able to interpret. Then these smart quotes that are not part of the ASCII char set should be output as Unicode chars. At least I hope so, if I have understood the disable-output-escaping="yes" attribute correctly.

[Zippy Aus]

Once again. Thanks Martin. I have my pages working perfectly.

Regards

S

[QuinTech]

Any ideas how to do this with FM v6? I tried what you prescribed above, but I get the error The specified funciton is not available: "]xalan://com.fmi.xslt.ExtensionFunctions:break_encode

J

[Martin Brändle]

The fmxslt extension functions are available in FMS7A only.

If you need to encode your line breaks with FM6, you should follow along this receipt.

[QuinTech]

Once again, thanks a ton, Martin. This works exactly as wanted.

I had tried to do a more complicated version of this very technique, but it failed because I was using & # 1 3 ; instead of & # x A ; . Substituting the new hex code for my original one, the function I wrote works. Do you know of a list of preferred XML hex codes? I had gotten & # 1 3 ; from what I believe to be a good source for HTML codes.

J

[Martin Brändle]

Something like this hex-decimal/decimal-hex calculator ?

Just type in A , hex --> dez yields 10

Type in 13 , dez --> hex yields D

& x D ; = & # 1 3 ;

& # 10 ; = & x A ;

See also these charts of Unicode values if you need some special characters.

[QuinTech]

Martin, that Unicode reference is great! I guess I will have to trap for xA and xD, as it seems a line break could be either one of those.

J

[QuinTech]

I know this doesn't happen, but this seems to have broken all on its own. The issue I am having is apparently [space] is getting confused with & # x A ; somehow.

When I view the XSLT in a text editor, I have the text & # x A ; in the appropriate place; but when I view it in my chosen XML editor (XMLShell), it changes to a carriage return (the line actually feeds immediately before where I would expect to see & # x A ;). And then when I import into FileMaker using this XSLT, I find that the string I intended to substitute for & # x A ; is being substituted for [space], but not for the newline, which is (of course) what I want.

I'm guessing there is some argument I need to use to avoid this, but I don't know where. Odd thing is, it was working until recently, and I'm sure that I didn't change anything!