escaping html with xslt

Ok... suppose you get some xml from a customer which looks like:
<footnote>
<![CDATA[T^j >= 25]]>
</footnote>

You could easily use the attribute disable-output-escaping if you only needed to put the value between a <td>. But what if you needed to transform it into something like

<td>
<a href="#footnote-1">T^j >= 25</a>
</td>

In this case your last stylesheet can't have a matching template like the one below since that would mean getting rid of the anchor tag.
<xsl:template match="td">
<xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
</xsl:template>

So when you KNOW what part of the xml can contain html tags, you can surround that data with a meta tag which you will use in the final transformation before serializing to xhtml.

So let's transform the above snippet to:

<footnote>
<nxp:escape>T^j >= 25</nxp:escape>
</footnote>

<xsl:template match="footnote">
<td>
<a href="#footnote-{position()}"><xsl:apply-templates select=./node()/></a>
</td>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

So now we get

<td>
<a href="#footnote-1">
<nxp:escape>T^j >= 25</nxp:escape>
</a>
</td>

In our last stylesheet we only need to to the following:

<xsl:template match="nxp:escape">
<xsl:value-of select="." disable-output-escaping="yes"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

Cheers,
Robby