XSLT transformation in ASP: XML with MSXML3

You might consider server-side XML-to-XML transformations rare, but you have to use <xsl:output method=”xml”> if you want to generate valid XHTML code from your XML data. To shorten the printouts, we’ll use a simple (non-XHTML) XSL transformation to generate the test results:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8" />

<xsl:template match="root">
  <output>
    Greek letter: <xsl:value-of select="@greek" /> 
    EE: <xsl:value-of select="@ee" />
  </output>
</xsl:template> 

</xsl:stylesheet>

As with HTML, MSXML3 interferes with the output, inserting improper UTF-16 encoding directive, resulting in the following XML text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?>
<output>
  Greek letter: β 
  EE: č
</output>

You could bypass this bug by setting the omit-xml-declaration attribute of the xsl:output element to yes …

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    
<xsl:output method="xml" encoding="utf-8" omit-xml-declaration="yes" />

… rest deleted …

… resulting in the following transformation output:

<output>
  Greek letter: β 
  EE: č
</output>

However, if you want to retain XML declaration in the XML document, you have to replace UTF-16 in the output string with UTF-8, like we did in the HTML transformation case. The following modified test program produces perfect XML document when used with the original XSLT transformation (without the omit-xml-declaration attribute):

<%
Const DOMClass = "MSXML2.DOMDocument"

Set XSLT = Server.CreateObject(DOMClass)
Set XDoc = Server.CreateObject(DOMClass)

XDoc.loadXML("<root greek='β' ee='č' />")
XSLT.load(Server.MapPath("SampleXSLT.xsl"))

Response.Clear
Response.Charset = "utf-8"
Response.Codepage = 65001
Response.Write Replace(XDoc.transformNode(XSLT), _
  "encoding=""UTF-16""","encoding=""utf-8""")
%>