[xsl] Re: regarding strip-space

[Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I read in the XSLT Reference that xsl:strip-space would actually
> remove
> the 
> whitespace-only text nodes from the source.
> My question is ..( sorry its a bit weird)
> 1.what is a whitespace-only node?? ( is it an empty element of kind 
> <myel></myel>)??
> 

No, a white-space-only node is a ***text*** node, not an element,
consisting of any combination of the following characters: space
(&#x20;), tab (&#9;), newline (&#10;) and carriage return (&#13;).

> 2.If i have empty elements like what i have shown
> above(<myel></myel>)
> and if i have to pick all the myel elements which have some text in
> it
> ( non 
> empty ) then , i beleive the only way to do it is through a condition
> <xsl:for-each select = //myel[not(string-length(.) = 0)]">
> is it true??
> 
> or are there any better ways to do it?
> 

If by "elements which have some text in it" you mean to have a
text-node child, then use the following:

myel[text()]

In case you need an element some of the descendents of which are text
nodes (not necessarily its immediate children), the following XPath
expression might be evaluated more efficiently:

myel[descendant::text()]

The XPath expression contained in your message:

myel[not(string-length(.) = 0)]

will also work in this case, but it requires that the concatenation of
all text node descendents be constructed (probably some intelligent
XPath engine will not do this?).




=====
Cheers,

Dimitre Novatchev.
http://fxsl.sourceforge.net/ -- the home of FXSL

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