Re: [xsl] XSLT engines and terminal newline

["Jay Bryant" <jay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> When I do an XSLT transformation with xsltproc, the output is
> always newline-terminated (final byte is a newline character).
> When I do the same transformation with Saxon 6.5, the output is
> not newline-terminated.
>
> For most purposes the difference doesn't matter. But to diff and
> some other text-processing tools, it does (diff considers any line
> that doesn't end with a newline to be an "incomplete line"; it
> goes ahead processes such a line as if they did end in a newline,
> but emits a "No newline at end of file" message in the diff).
>
> I know I can make changes within my stylesheet to ensure that the
> terminal newline gets added to the Saxon output, but the problem
> is that if I then use the same stylesheet with xsltproc, I end up
> with two newlines at the end of the file (and so an unnecessary
> blank line at the end). I also know that for the case of XML
> output, I can do a postprocessing step to run it through a tool
> that produces canonical XML -- which will ensure that it ends with
> single newline -- but that does me no good for HTML output.
>
> Has anybody else run into this issue? Any suggestions about how to
> deal with it?
>


It's never been an issue for me (I'm willing to live with the issue in my
diffs), but I have a suggestion: Pass a parameter to the stylesheet to tell
it whether to add a newline. If you have other processor-specific issues,
you could pass the name of the processor as a parameter and set all kinds of
things accordingly.

Jay Bryant
Bryant Communication Services