The following XSL code will produce a newline (line feed) character:

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

For a carriage return, use:

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

My favoured method for doing this looks something like:

<xsl:stylesheet>

<xsl:output method='text'/>

<xsl:variable name='newline'><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

<!-- note that the layout there is deliberate -->

...

</xsl:stylesheet>

Then, whenever you want to output a newline (perhaps in csv) you can output something like the following:

<xsl:value-of select="concat(elem1,elem2,elem3,$newline)" />

I’ve used this technique when outputting sql from xml input. In fact, I tend to create variables for commas, quotes and newlines.

Include the attribute Method=”text” on the xsl:output tag and include newlines in your literal content in the XSL at the appropriate points. If you prefer to keep the source code of your XSL tidy use the entity where you want a new line.

You can use: <xsl:text> </xsl:text>

see the example

<xsl:variable name="module-info">
  <xsl:value-of select="@name" /> = <xsl:value-of select="@rev" />
  <xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:variable>

if you write this in file e.g.

<redirect:write file="temp.prop" append="true">
  <xsl:value-of select="$module-info" />
</redirect:write>

this variable will produce a new line infile as:

commons-dbcp_commons-dbcp = 1.2.2
junit_junit = 4.4
org.easymock_easymock = 2.4

You can try,

<xsl:text>
</xsl:text>

It will work.

IMHO no more info than @Florjon gave is needed. Maybe some small details are left to understand why it might not work for us sometimes.

First of all, the &#xa (hex) or &#10 (dec) inside a <xsl:text/> will always work, but you may not see it.

1. There is no newline in a HTML markup. Using a simple <br/> will do fine. Otherwise you’ll see a white space. Viewing the source from the browser will tell you what really happened. However, there are cases you expect this behaviour, especially if the consumer is not directly a browser. For instance, you want to create an HTML page and view its structure formatted nicely with empty lines and idents before serving it to the browser.
2. Remember where you need to use disable-output-escaping and where you don’t. Take the following example where I had to create an xml from another and declare its DTD from a stylesheet.

The first version does escape the characters (default for xsl:text)

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

    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text><!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">


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

</xsl:stylesheet>

and here is the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">


<Subscriptions>
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

Ok, it does what we expect, escaping is done so that the characters we used are displayed properly. The XML part formatting inside the root node is handled by ident="yes". But with a closer look we see that the newline character &#xa was not escaped and translated as is, performing a double linefeed! I don’t have an explanation on this, will be good to know. Anyone?

The second version does not escape the characters so they’re producing what they’re meant for. The change made was:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"><!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">


</xsl:text>

and here is the result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Subscriptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">

<Subscriptions>
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

and that will be ok. Both cr and lf are properly rendered.

3. Don’t forget we’re talking about nl, not crlf (nl=lf). My first attempt was to use only cr:&#xd and while the output xml was validated by DOM properly.

I was viewing a corrupted xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Subscriptions>riptions SYSTEM "Subscriptions.dtd">
    <User id="1"/>   
</Subscriptions>

DOM parser disregarded control characters but the rendered didn’t. I spent quite some time bumping my head before I realised how silly I was not seeing this!

For the record, I do use a variable inside the body with both CRLF just to be 100% sure it will work everywhere.

I added the DOCTYPE directive you see here:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
  <!ENTITY nl "
">
]>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2005/02/query-test-XQTSCatalog"
                xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                version="2.0">

This allows me to use &nl; instead of to produce a newline in the output. Like other solutions, this is typically placed inside a <xsl:text> tag.

I second Nic Gibson’s method, this was
always my favorite:

<xsl:variable name='nl'><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

However I have been using the Ant task <echoxml> to
create stylesheets and run them against files. The
task will do attribute value templates, e.g. ${DSTAMP} ,
but is also will reformat your xml, so in some
cases, the entity reference is preferable.

<xsl:variable name='nl'><xsl:text>
</xsl:text></xsl:variable>

I have found a difference between literal newlines in <xsl:text> and literal newlines using .

While literal newlines worked fine in my environment (using both Saxon and the default Java XSLT processor) my code failed when it was executed by another group running in a .NET environment.

Changing to entities ( ) got my file generation code running consistently on both Java and .NET.

Also, literal newlines are vulnerable to being reformatted by IDEs and can inadvertently get lost when the file is maintained by someone ‘not in the know’.

I’ve noticed from my experience that producing a new line INSIDE a <xsl:variable> clause doesn’t work.
I was trying to do something like:

<xsl:variable name="myVar">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myValue" />
      <xsl:text></xsl:text> <!--NEW LINE-->
      <xsl:text>My other value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myOtherValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<div>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar"/>
</div>

Anything I tried to put in that “new line” (the empty <xsl:text> node) just didn’t work (including most of the simpler suggestions in this page), not to mention the fact that HTML just won’t work there, so eventually I had to split it to 2 variables, call them outside the <xsl:variable> scope and put a simple <br/> between them, i.e:

<xsl:variable name="myVar1">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="myVar2">
  <xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="@myValue != ''">
      <xsl:text>My other value: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@myOtherValue" />
    </xsl:when>
  </xsl:choose>
<xsl:variable>

<div>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar1"/>
  <br/>
  <xsl:value-of select="$myVar2"/>
</div>

Yeah, I know, it’s not the most sophisticated solution but it works, just sharing my frustration experience with XSLs 😉

I couldn’t just use the <xsl:text> </xsl:text> approach because if I format the XML file using XSLT the entity will disappear. So I had to use a slightly more round about approach using variables

<xsl:variable name="nl" select="'
'"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:value-of select="$nl" disable-output-escaping="no"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:text xml:space="preserve">
</xsl:text>

With Saxon-HE 12.4 (xml+xsl->html) + iText 7.1.x (html->pdf) only this worked for me:

    <xsl:variable name="myTwoLinesText">
        <xsl:text>First line</xsl:text><br/>
        <xsl:text>Second line</xsl:text>
    </xsl:variable> 

just add this tag:

<br/>

it works for me 😉 .