XSL to produce mixed xml/text output

Question

I'd like to do something similar as asked here: how to include the node XML in my XSLT text output? or, shortly explained:

• input is XML
• convert using XSL to a different syntax (non-XML)
• copy an XML sub-tree verbatim to the output

Both options presented in the topic referenced above are interesting, but will not work, because my input XML doc uses (possibly multiple) namespaces and:

• when using xsl:output=text (answer 2) the namespaces of the input XML are lost. I can use name() instead of local-name() but then still the namespace declarations are missing. Is there a nice way of collecting the referred namespace declarations and insert them?
• if I use the xsl:output=xml way (answer 1), I get the namespaces in the generated XML properly, but then I somehow need to escape the quotes of the XML attributes - any idea how to do this?
• Another problem with solution 1 is, if XML-special chars like & are in the input XML, then the textual output has them still as & (which is of course correct but not what I need)

Example:

<bla:Library xmlns:bla="ns1" xmlns:blub="ns2">
  <blub:Book id="123">
    <Title>Python Does Everythig &amp; more</Title>
    <Author>Smith</Author>
  </Book>
...

And, different from the original post, the result shall be (note the quoting and handling of the &). And, yes the output syntax in my case is different (not DB-related, therefore I need the quotes around the raw XML output), but to stick with the original example ...:

Python Does Everything & more|Smith|"<bla:Book xmlns:bla=\"ns1\" xmlns:blub=\"ns2\" id=\"123\"><blub:Title>Python Does Everythig &amp; more</Title>Author>Smith</Author></Book>"

Seems as if this is quite impossible but maybe somebody knows a nice trick ... :-) Regards, tge

Answer 1

With standard XSL I could not find a way of doing this, but I used the possibility to create an extension module (in my case with libxslt - but seems to be standard XSL), which does the conversion. So, my XSL now looks like this:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" ...
     xmlns:tge="http://xmlsoft.org/xslt/tgeplugin"
     extension-element-prefixes="tge">
...
<xsl:for-each select="bla:Book">
  <xsl:text> "</xsl:text><tge:tgeplugin select="."/><xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
</xsl:for-each>

and my extension plugin implements "tgeplugin" (see examples with libxslt how to do that). There, I use a few libxml2 functions to effectively produce a new XML tag "<text>" containing the actual input XML as text value (with quotes escaped).

Not standard XSL, but for my problem probably the least ugly way :-)