Being for the benefit of Mr Shite

...like me. This is just a post for the poor .Net coder out there in some remote corner of the world who, like me, will find themselves wondering why the hell their XSL transformations using disable-output-escaping are ending up with their output being escaped. For me this meant invalid KML, where hte CDATA sections I needed weren't being output correctly. I knew the transformation worked just by putting the XML and XSL together, but my cheapo web service did the transformation via C# and was screwing it up.

So if you're that coder of modest capacity like myself, here's where I got my clues:

• This thread told me that the XmlTextWriter which is part of my Transform class would be ignoring "disable-output-escaping", and that I should write to a stream instead.
• Never having actually done much with streams, I found these utility methods perfect for cut-n-paste MemoryStream-to-string conversion

Job done.

If you happen to be wondering how you can output a CDATA section in your XSLT, I wanted to put that in here too but unsurprisingly Blogger doesn't like that code. I'll see if I can find a way around that. Google "disable-output-escaping CDATA", that should get you somewhere!