How to implement Carriage return in XSLT

Question

I want to implement carriage return within xslt. The problem is I have a varible: Step 1 = Value 1 breaktag Step 2 = Value 2 as a string and would like to appear as

Answer 1

This works for me, as carriage-return + life feed.

<xsl:text>&#xD;&#xA;</xsl:text>

The "
" string does not work.

Answer 2

This is the only solution that worked for me. Except I was replacing 
 with \r\n

Answer 3

Here is an approach that uses a recursive template, which looks for 
 in the string from the database and then outputs the substring before. If there is a substring after 
 remaining, then the template calls itself until there is nothing left. In case 
 is not present then the text is simply output.

Here is the template call (just replace @ActivityExtDescription with your database field):

<xsl:call-template name="MultilineTextOutput">
    <xsl:with-param name="text" select="@ActivityExtDescription" />
</xsl:call-template>

and here is the code for the template itself:

<xsl:template name="MultilineTextOutput">
<xsl:param name="text"/>
<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="contains($text, '&#10;')">
        <xsl:variable name="text-before-first-break">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '&#10;')" />
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="text-after-first-break">
            <xsl:value-of select="substring-after($text, '&#10;')" />
        </xsl:variable>

        <xsl:if test="not($text-before-first-break = '')">
            <xsl:value-of select="$text-before-first-break" /><br />
        </xsl:if>

        <xsl:if test="not($text-after-first-break = '')">
            <xsl:call-template name="MultilineTextOutput">
                <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$text-after-first-break" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="$text" /><br />
    </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Works like a charm!!!

Answer 4

The cleanest way I've found is to insert !ENTITY declarations at the top of the stylesheet for newline, tab, and other common text constructs. When having to insert a slew of formatting elements into your output this makes the transform sheet look much cleaner.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
    <!ENTITY nl "<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:template match="step">
    &nl;&nl;
    <xsl:apply-templates  />
  </xsl:template>

...