I'm in Symphony CMS trying to return an article image like so.
<img src="{$workspace}/uploads/{/data/news-articles/entry/image-thumbnail}"/>
The output looks like this
<img src="/workspace/uploads/%0A%09%09%09%09penuts_thumb.png%0A%09%09%09%09%0A%09%09%09">
If I just try to return the node value
<xsl:value-of select="image-thumbnail" />
Output looks correct
penuts_thumb.png
Any thoughts on why I'm getting all the excess characters?
Output looks correct
No, it only "looks correct", because the browser ignores white-space characters.
What happens is that the string "penuts_thumb.png" is surrounded by whitespace. When this whitespace is serialized as part of the src attribute value, it is encoded (normalized) -- this is why you see %0A (code for newline) anf %09 (code for tab).
This transformation helps to see exactly what is generated in each case:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:variable name="workspace" select="'/workspace'"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<img src="{$workspace}/uploads/{/data/news-articles/entry/image-thumbnail}"/>
===========
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="entry">
"<xsl:value-of select="image-thumbnail"/>"
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when applied on this XML document:
<data>
<news-articles>
<entry>
<image-thumbnail>
penuts_thumb.png
</image-thumbnail>
</entry>
</news-articles>
</data>
produces this output:
<img src="/workspace/uploads/%0A penuts_thumb.png%0A ">
===========
"
penuts_thumb.png
"
As we can see (thanks to the quotes) in the second case the string "penuts_thumb.png" is also surrounded by a lot of whitespace characters.
Solution:
Use the normalize-space() function in this way:
<img src=
"{$workspace}/uploads/{normalize-space(/data/news-articles/entry/image-thumbnail)}"/>
