title: XSL Substring-before with HTML characters
body: <p>I am pulling in an rss feed which contains a joke followed by a number of links to share the joke on different services. As shown below:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5S6qp.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5S6qp.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>It may be worth noting that when I tried to copy and paste the text from this output, the links did not copy into notepad, and pasted as pictures into MS Word.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>In my XSL I am using <code>substring-before</code> in an attempt to exclude these links from my output, but the only consistent character I can think to use is the <code>&lt;a href</code> from the hyperlinks, which will always be at the end. Is this possible? My first pass at it failed, is there an escape character I should include?</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Perhaps I will just try to exclude the last <code>X</code> characters to remove the links</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately I could not find an XML version of the feed either, my source is here: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyJokes-ACleanJokeEveryday?format=xml" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyJokes-ACleanJokeEveryday?format=xml</a></p>
  
  <p>Here is the XSL I am working with, which is currently hard-coded to break at the end of the most recent joke (my next hurdle is to iterate through this list)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
  &lt;xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"&gt;
  &lt;xsl:output method="html"/&gt;
    &lt;xsl:template match="/"&gt;
      &lt;xsl:apply-templates select="//item[position() &amp;lt; 2]"/&gt;
    &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
  
    &lt;xsl:template match="item"&gt;
      &lt;content-item&gt;
        &lt;h1&gt;&lt;xsl:value-of select="title"/&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;     
            &lt;p&gt;&lt;xsl:value-of select="substring-before(description, 'mower')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
        &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
        &lt;p&gt;"The following is here for testing purposes and will be removed"&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;xsl:value-of select="substring-after(description, 'lawn')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
        &lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
      &lt;/content-item&gt;
    &lt;/xsl:template&gt;
  &lt;/xsl:stylesheet&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am rendering my output via a SharePoint 2013 RSS feed web part</p>