Saxon / NodeJS : xslt3 command line says "Command line option -export requires a value"

Question

I am trying to perform an XSLT transformation in NodeJS. I found that Saxon looked like a good option (https://www.saxonica.com/download/javascript.xml), so I installed both saxon-js and xslt3 using npm.

Following the documentation here : https://www.npmjs.com/package/saxon-js (section Compiling a stylesheet), I cd to a folder containing my xsl file source.xsl and try to run the command :

xslt3 -xsl:source.xsl -export:source.sef.json

I get the error : Command line option -export requires a value which I don't understand.

If I try to run the complete command line like in the documentation

xslt3 -xsl:source.xsl -export:source.sef.json -t -ns:##html5

I get another error: The -ns: parameter requires one argument. + CategoryInfo : ParserError: (:) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ParameterRequiresArgument

I am quite lost here, any thought on what might be wrong ?

I tried to use blank spaces instead of colon in the command line, or changing the order of the paramters, but still get the same error.

Answer 1

It seems that the problem is caused by the VSCode command line requiring the colon character (":") to be escaped in some way.