Bug or Feature: unescaping & in href attribute while in HTML output method

[Robert Schiele]

Hi.

I am not sure whether the following is correct and such intended
behaviour, or it is a bug in Xalan-c 1.4:

Take the following XSLT script:

---
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
  <xsl:output method="html"/>
  
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <a href="&amp;"/>  
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
---

Take any XML file and run Xalan on them.

You get:

# Xalan xalanbug.xml xalanbug.xsl
<a href="&"></a>
#

As c/src/XMLSupport/FormatterToHTML.cpp says:

        // http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt says:
        // A URI is always in an "escaped" form, since escaping or unescaping a
        // completed URI might change its semantics.  Normally, the only time
        // escape encodings can safely be made is when the URI is being created
        // from its component parts; each component may have its own set of
        // characters that are reserved, so only the mechanism responsible for
        // generating or interpreting that component can determine whether or
        // not escaping a character will change its semantics. Likewise, a URI
        // must be separated into its components before the escaped characters
        // within those components can be safely decoded.
        //
        // ...So we do our best to do limited escaping of the URL, without
        // causing damage.      If the URL is already properly escaped, in theory, this
        // function should not change the string value.

I would have expected "&amp;" to stay in escaped mode, but this is not
the case.

So the question is for me, which behaviour is correct?  The one
Xalan-c 1.4 works or the one not touching the URI?

Robert

-- 
Robert Schiele                  Tel.: +49-621-181-2517
Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker      mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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