Encoding Encoded Characters in XSLT for Deployment

Let’s say you are deploying out some pages, which may include some custom forms out to a list. In that case, it is pretty straight forward (example: http://www.3guysonsharepoint.com/?p=1004), just do a find and replace in your XLST for < and >, and replace with &lt; and &gt; respectively, paste it within the XSL property (<property name="Xsl" type="string">).

One thing that may trip you up, is if you actually need to keep a < or > sign in your XSLT – but, you cannot deploy the code with that, or else you’ll run into issues…

The fix? Quite simple, just encode the encoded characters, changing the ampersand (&) to &amp;lt; and &amp;gt;, also respectively.