title: Automatically converting escaped characters to string literals
body: <p>I am working on an XSLT transformation to re-arrange XML blocks to validate NewsML files. Some of these files contains encoded characters (such as &amp;amp; &amp;quot; etc...). The problem is the XSLT transformation is converting these characters to their literal string (ie "and",  "'"). This is causing problems. I do not want this to happen.</p>
  
  <p>I have experimented with various techniques (uses of &lt;xsl:text&gt;, &lt;xsl:value-of&gt; and the disable-output-escaping flag, &lt;xsl:output method='xml|html|xhtml|text'&gt;) to no avail. These methods either, convert the characters, or simply leave them out.</p>
  
  <p>eg, a string which starts with "stars on PM&amp;amp;apos;s cards" can end up as</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>stars on PM's cards</li>
  <li>stars on PMs cards</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I am using the Saxonica (<a href="http://www.saxonica.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.saxonica.com/</a>) processing app.</p>
  
  <p>The basic XSLT I am using is provided below. (There are other things but the problem exists even with this simplest stylesheet)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&gt;
     &lt;xsl:output method="xml" indent="no" /&gt;
     &lt;xsl:template match="@*|node()"&gt;
        &lt;xsl:copy&gt;
           &lt;xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/&gt;
        &lt;/xsl:copy&gt;
     &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
  &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any ideas on how to prevent this conversion would be most appreciated. The requirement is to keep the original text as it appears.</p>