How can I remove or escape new line-carriage returns within an XML string in XSL?

Question

I've got an ASP multiline textbox that saves user defined text to a database. When I retrieve the data, I serialize it into xml and then run it through an XSL transform to output my HTML.

Within my transform, I am passing the textbox defined data into a javascript function via an onclick event of an element.

The problem I'm running into...when a user enters a carriage return into the textbox and saves it to the database, a javascript error is generated on page load.

I'm using .NET's XslCompiledTransform to do the transform. There is a property on XmlDocument called PreserveWhiteSpace, default is false, that can be set to strip out white space in the XML. This solves the problem of not allowing a user to enter breaking text, however, the client wants to preserve the formatting of the text that they enter if at all possible.

From what I know, .NET XslCompiledTransform transforms carriage returns-new line into 

. I believe these are the characters that are breaking the javascript.

My first thought was to strip out the carriage returns within the xsl prior to passing the string into the javascript function, but I've not been able to figure out what characters to "search" the string for.

I guess another question is what characters get stored in SQL for carriage returns from within an ASP.NET textbox control?

Looking directly at the data in the database, SQL seems to display the character as "non-displayable" characters or (2 empty boxes).

Has anyone had any experience with this type of thing?

Answer 1

I was able to do this in the code behind to get my desired results:

using (StringWriter sWriter = new StringWriter())
        {

            xTrans.Transform(xDoc, xslArgs, sWriter);

            return sWriter.ToString().Replace("
", "\\r\\n");
        }

Answer 2

One other thing that I've stumbled across...

Initially, I wanted to find a solution to this problem that did not require a "compiled" code change, ie. a way to do this within xsl aka "a short term fix".

I tried this first and was not successful...

<xsl:variable name="comment" select="normalize-space(.\Comment)" />

This essentially did nothing and I was still receiving the javascript error.

Eventually, I tried this...

<div onclick="Show('{normalize-space($comment)}'"></div>

The second actually worked in stripping out the white space, thus, the javascript error was avoided. This wasn't a complete solution for my requirements because it only solved the issue of the javascript error, however, it would effectively prevent the user from "breaking" the page.

For that reason, it could suffice as a short term solution.