[xsl] whitespace problem

["Devon Y." <vehementpetal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've got these nodes that looks like:

<artist>
  <name>Commandos</name>
  <photo>commandos.jpg</photo>
  <song_title>Everybody's Way</song_title>
  <hash>dbs8ud9bq3ddffdf</hash>
  <bio>blah blah blah</bio>
  <buy_link>commandos.htm</buy_link>
  <sponser_name>Some Company</sponser_name>
  <sponser_url>http://www.some-company.com/</sponser_url>
  <date>2003-07-03</date>
</artist>

...and I need to turn these into text file of tab separated values, each 
artist element must have a line break after it. Basically I'm turning it 
into a .sql file. I'm having strange strange troubles though. I've done lots 
of transformations, but never into method='text' before, so I've never dealt 
with whitespace.

I've plowed through some articles at xml.com on whitespace, but nothing's 
working right. The examples work, but when I alter them to fit what I need, 
it leaves out the tab. I think the problem's in this, but I don't understand 
why the tabs & newline are being stripped, when they weren't stripped when I 
tried the  example files -

<xsl:template match="artists">
 <xsl:apply-templates select="name"/>
 <xsl:text>&#9;</xsl:text>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="photo"/>
 <xsl:text>&#9;</xsl:text>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="song_title"/>
 <xsl:text>&#9;</xsl:text>
 <xsl:apply-templates select="date"/><xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
</xsl:template>

...I tried changing the xsl:apply-templates to xsl:value-of, and it didn't 
change the output. I'm really confused.


Dev

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