XSL Substring-before with HTML characters

Question

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:

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.

In my XSL I am using substring-before in an attempt to exclude these links from my output, but the only consistent character I can think to use is the <a href 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?

Perhaps I will just try to exclude the last X characters to remove the links

Unfortunately I could not find an XML version of the feed either, my source is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyJokes-ACleanJokeEveryday?format=xml

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)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="//item[position() &lt; 2]"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="item">
    <content-item>
      <h1><xsl:value-of select="title"/></h1>     
          <p><xsl:value-of select="substring-before(description, 'mower')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></p>
      <br/><br/>
      <p>"The following is here for testing purposes and will be removed"<br/><br/><xsl:value-of select="substring-after(description, 'lawn')" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></p>
      <br/><br/>
    </content-item>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I am rendering my output via a SharePoint 2013 RSS feed web part

Answer 1

In trying to view the proper XML I discovered the solution. I viewed the page source for my source URL, and in that I saw that the final characters are displayed as follows:

    <title>Hunting with a wife #Joke #Humor</title><description>A hunter visited another hunter and was given a tour of his home. In the den was a stuffed lion.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The visiting hunter asked, "when did you bag him?"&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The host said, "that was three years ago, when I went hunting with my wife."&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;"What's he stuffed with," asked the visiting hunter. "My wife."&lt;div class="feedflare"&gt;
&lt;a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DailyJokes-ACleanJokeEveryday?a=RT1LsKVBV3Y:0LcrJjJq2X4:yIl2AUoC8zA"&gt;&lt;img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/DailyJokes-ACleanJokeEveryday?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"&gt;&lt;/img&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href....

The point being, the a href doesnt have a < it uses HTML markup <.

substring-before(description, '<a href') works.