Re: [xsl] How to remove (in addition) empty attributes?

Subject: Re: [xsl] How to remove (in addition) empty attributes?
From: Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 08:50:06 -0500
Ah, guess I was answering a slightly different question. If you are
trying to kill any element that has either no child nodes at all, or
has only child attribute nodes that are empty, perhaps

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; version="1.0">
   <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
   <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
     </xsl:copy>
   </xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="*[normalize-space( concat(.,@*) )='']"/>
 </xsl:stylesheet>

will do the trick.

The first part is a typical identity transform. The last template
there matches any element whose content & attribute values combined
consist of nothing other than whitespace.

There may be better ways to do this, but I think it does what you
want.

> The problem with this is that only elements OR attributes are
> stripped but not both at the same time.
> Assume the following XML source:
> <ns11:elem1 myattr="">
>    <ns22:subelem2 />
>    <ns22:subelem3></ns22:subelem3>
> </ns11:elem1>
> Then applying the XSLT script below will result in
> <ns11:elem1>
> </ns11:elem1>
> As you can see the ns11:elem1 persists.
> It is handled only in the remove attribute template and does not
> match the other remove-empty-element template.
> So how can I iteratively/recursively re-apply the script/templates
> on the result again?
> XSLT script:
> <?xml version="1.0"?>
> <xsl:stylesheet   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";  version="1.0">
>   <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
>   <xsl:template match="@*[normalize-space(.)='']"/>
>   <xsl:template match="*[not(node())]"/> 
>   <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
>      <xsl:copy>
>        <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
>      </xsl:copy>
>   </xsl:template>
> </xsl:stylesheet>

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