[xsl] strip leading whitespace for sorting

[Joe Barwell <jbar@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello people,

XSLT 1.0, Firefox 3.0 & other recent browsers.

I've got a problem with nodes that contain leading whitespace that I 
want to strip, because it's affecting my sorts.

I've had a look at the list archives & dpawson's faq. Is it true that 
the only way to strip leading whitespace is as shown here: < 
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/N8321.html#d12429e833 >? It looks 
like a lot of hard work.

FWIW, below is my current xsl stylesheet, which gets called from within 
php... which is processing some pretty basic xml sent from a wsdl/soap 
thing-a-mejig (a list of countries & currencies).

As you can see, I've tried to use <xsl:strip-space elements="*" /> & 
<xsl:copy>, but may, in my ignorance, simply be misusing those tools.

TIA for any pointers. Cheers!

Joe


<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>

<!-- This is required so that &#160; is correctly rendered -->
<xsl:output encoding="iso-8859-1" />
<!-- Doesn't fix the problem with spaces affecting sort order -->
<xsl:strip-space elements="*" />

<xsl:template match="/">
	<table border='2'><tr><th>Currency Name</th><th>Currency 
Code</th><th>Country Name</th><th>Country Code</th></tr>
	<!-- Is this achieving anything? -->
	<xsl:copy>
	<xsl:for-each select="NewDataSet/Table">
		<xsl:sort select="Currency" order="ascending" />
		<xsl:sort select="Name" order="ascending" />
		<xsl:call-template name="displayCurrency" />
	</xsl:for-each>
	</xsl:copy>
	</table>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template name="displayCurrency">
	<xsl:variable name="theCurrencyName" select="Currency" />
	<xsl:variable name="theCurrencyCode" select="CurrencyCode" />	
	<tr><td><xsl:value-of select="$theCurrencyName" 
/>&#160;</td><td><xsl:value-of select="$theCurrencyCode" 
/>&#160;</td><td><xsl:value-of select="Name" /></td><td><xsl:value-of 
select="CountryCode" /></td></tr>\n
</xsl:template>


</xsl:stylesheet>