'Add Line Break With XSLT

I'm trying to add a line break to the XML output with my XSLT.

here is what I'm trying to do.

<Description>
        <xsl:value-of select=concat($var1,ADD_LINE_BREAK,$var2,ADD_LINE_BREAK,$var3)"/>
</Description>

* I realize that ADD_LINE_BREAK is not correct XSLT syntax

The xml output would then look something like this:

<Description>

$var1

$var2

$var3

</Description>

Thanks!

UPDATE

It looks like that actually works, but I think I'm figuring out the REAL problem. Quick run down on what I'm doing. Pull XML data from a system -> use XSLT transform to massage the data -> putting xml output into a different system. I think my issue is that the system that I'm putting the data into doesn't understand the line breaks, so I might need a way to figure out how to include HTML line breaks, so that the system can consume.

I've tried this with no luck

<Description>
              <xsl:value-of select="$var1"/>
              <br></br>
              <xsl:value-of select="$var2"/>
              <br></br>
              <xsl:value-of select="$var3"/>
 </Decsription>
xslt


Solution 1:[1]

Try something like this:

<Description>
        <xsl:value-of select="$var1" /><xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="$var2" /><xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="$var3" />
</Description>

This will add a line feed (\n) character. Maybe you will need to add extra <xsl:text>&#xa;</xsl:text> to get the additional linebreaks in your desired output.

Solution 2:[2]

Use either &#xA; or &10; for a line feed character.

Use either &#xD; or &13; for a carriage return character.

Solution 3:[3]

Believe it or not, depending on how fussy your XSLT processor or XML validation is, I've found this embarrassingly simple one works when all else -- like &#xD; or &10;, etc. -- fails (including a literal like <br>,/br>:

<xsl:text>

</xsl:text>

One or more lines for your preference.

Solution 4:[4]

I had a similar issue where I had a string field called DESCRIPTION, which had line breaks between paragraphs, but the output kept showing up like this:

This was the first paragraph<br><br>This was the second paragraph.

So I used tokenize to separate everything between the <br><br> tags like this:

<xsl:for-each select="tokenize(DESCRIPTION,'&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;')">
    <item>
        <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/><br></br><br></br>
    </item>
</xsl:for-each>

And it worked for me.

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Mithrandir
Solution 2 Daniel Haley
Solution 3 Pranamedic
Solution 4 Todd K

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