I have a series of localizations in the format "<1> <1<user//users>1> currently online: <2> | <3> <3<guest//guests>3> | <4> <4<bot//bots>4>". I think the functionality of the string speaks for itself. Normally, this would be parsed ahead of time by some PHP. Unfortunately, the problem is that <2> in this instance happens to emit a series of hyperlinks. When my XSL transform emits these links, the tags vanish into thin air.
I thought of perhaps parsing this more directly with the XSL stylesheet, or even converting the localizations into another format. My problem is that I need to be able to drop information into tags like <1>, I can't just rely on string concatenation because the numbered tags will sometimes appear out of order in languages with different sentence structure. My Chinese language pack often has the numbers appearing in non-sequential order.
It would be nice to actually convert these localizations into XML somehow but I'm unsure as to how I could represent an arbitrary sentence string with data drop points in XML.