Re: [xsl] Where did my tabs go? Trying to understand xsl:value-of, tabs and the separator attribute

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Carlisle wrote:

> > (no tabs) <xsl:value-of select="somenode" separator="{&tab;}" />
> >     
>
> That one's an error: the &tab; is expanded before xslt starts so it is an
> AVT where the expression in {} is just a tab character which isn't a
> legal xpath expression.
>   

Ouch, that hurts! Cut 'n' paste typo and I thought to have checked them 
all. Well, I meant "{'&tab;'}" ;-)

> <!DOCTYPE x [
> <!ENTITY tab "&#x09;" >
> <!ENTITY tab2 "&#38;#x09;" >
> ]>
>   

This is where I fell asleep during the lesson last year ;-)
I'm sure I saw this before. Thanks! Now it works as I expect it to. I 
can even use the character map, so as to prevent the tabs to be 
re-interpreted when I micro-pipeline some data, or use a normalize-space 
somewhere too often.

> isn't white space fun??
>   

Haha. Nightmarish fun, yes. Some day in ancient history, I thought I had 
it all figured out. But recently we started redesigning some of the xslt 
libraries and we messed up big time in these corner areas of whitespace 
handling.

I am sure this issue also has to do with the way I am mistreating 
newline characters.

One more question that I still don't get. If XML parses these entities 
before it gets to XSLT, and if XML has predefined entities &amp; &lt; 
&gt &apos; and &quot; why can't I use the following to the same success?

<!DOCTYPE x [
   <!ENTITY tab "&#x09;" >
   <!ENTITY tab2 "&amp;#x09;" >
]>

It will produce '&#x09;' where you previously got '   ' (tab).

Hmm, thinking out loud here: if I get rid of that character map, and I 
stick to the lovely &tab; (defined as your &tab2;), do I risk loosing 
the tab characters in the output stream when I tossle and hossle them 
hence and forth through my templates during a single pass? Meaning, can 
normalize-space, strip-space, xsl:value-of, xsl:variable + pipelining, 
xsl:function etc be a spoil-sport for me?  (if so, character maps are 
safer, if not, I can as well get rid of them)

Cheers and thanks!
-- Abel Braaksma
   http://www.nuntia.com