fn:unparsed-text function reads an external resource (for example, a
file) and returns a string representation of the resource.
$href argument must be a string in the form of a URI
reference, which must contain no fragment identifier, and
must identify a resource for which a string representation is
available. If the URI is a relative URI reference, then it is resolved relative to the
static base URI property from the static context.
The mapping of URIs to the string representation of a resource is the mapping defined in the available text resources component of the dynamic context.
If the value of the
$href argument is an empty sequence, the function
returns an empty sequence.
$encoding argument, if present, is the name of an encoding. The values
for this attribute follow the same rules as for the
encoding attribute in
an XML declaration. The only values which every implementation is required to recognize are
The encoding of the external resource is determined as follows:
external encoding information is used if available, otherwise
if the media type of the resource is
application/xml (see ), or if it matches
and/or its successors), then the encoding is recognized
as specified in , otherwise
the value of the
$encoding argument is used if present, otherwise
the processor may use implementation-defined heuristics to determine the likely encoding, otherwise
UTF-8 is assumed.
The result of the function is a string containing the string representation of the resource retrieved using the URI.
This XSLT example attempts to read a file containing 'boilerplate' HTML and copy it directly to the serialized output file:<xsl:output method="html"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:value-of select="unparsed-text('header.html', 'iso-8859-1')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/> <xsl:apply-templates/> <xsl:value-of select="unparsed-text('footer.html', 'iso-8859-1')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/> </xsl:template>
A dynamic error is raised if
contains a fragment identifier, or if it cannot be resolved
to an absolute URI (for example, because the base-URI property in the static context is absent),
or if it cannot be used to retrieve the string
representation of a resource.
A dynamic error is raised if the value of the
$encoding argument is not a valid encoding name, if the processor does not support the specified encoding, if
the string representation of the retrieved resource contains octets that cannot be
decoded into Unicode characters using the specified
encoding, or if the resulting characters are not permitted XML characters.
A dynamic error is raised if
is absent and the processor cannot infer the
encoding using external information and the encoding is not UTF-8.
If it is appropriate to use a base URI other than the dynamic base URI (for example,
when resolving a relative URI reference read from a source document) then it is
advisable to resolve the relative URI reference using the
function before passing it to the
There is no essential relationship between the sets of URIs accepted by the two
fn:doc (a URI accepted by one
may or may not be accepted by the other), and if a URI is accepted by both there is no
essential relationship between the results (different resource representations are
permitted by the architecture of the web).
There are no constraints on the MIME type of the resource.
The fact that the resolution of URIs is defined by a mapping in the dynamic context means that in effect, various aspects of the behavior of this function are implementation-defined. Implementations may provide external configuration options that allow any aspect of the processing to be controlled by the user. In particular:
The rules for determining the encoding are chosen for consistency with . Files with an XML media type are treated specially because there are use cases for this function where the retrieved text is to be included as unparsed XML within a CDATA section of a containing document, and because processors are likely to be able to reuse the code that performs encoding detection for XML external entities.
If the text file contains characters such as
these will typically be output as
the string is serialized as XML or HTML. If these characters actually represent markup
(for example, if the text file contains HTML), then an XSLT stylesheet can attempt to
write them as markup to the output file using the
attribute of the
xsl:value-of instruction. Note, however, that XSLT
implementations are not required to support this feature.