Re: [xsl] generate an element only if the result is not empty

Subject: Re: [xsl] generate an element only if the result is not empty
From: Manuel Souto Pico <manuel.souto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:48:23 +0200
i David and Michael,

Thank you very much for your prompt reply.

You are right about node(), I had misunderstood what it does. And you are almost right in that my requirement is to ignore any seg elements with element content but for the time being, your proposal is good enough.

With your template I get no term element, which is good, but the termEntry is still generated, even if there's no content inside (only elements). So I suppose I should move your template out to use it before I create the termEntry element. I'm try to sort that out, but if I don't manage with XSL it's not an issue, it's easy to remove by search&replace.

I can also use strip-space or normalize-space now to remove extra whitespace between or within elements from other parts of the file.

Thanks a lot!
Manuel

David Carlisle wrote:
The template (using select="node()" and not select=".")

    <xsl:template match="seg">
        <term>
            <xsl:value-of select="node()" />

That's a very strange construct to use, especially in xslt 1.

node() selects all the children and then value-of discards all but the
first, which means that if there are child elements as in your example
you get just the first indentation white space if there is any, however
if the first child had not been indented you would get the string value
of the first element.

<seg>
<it>&lt;/Title&gt;</it>
<bpt i="1" type="struct">&lt;Elt type='Groupbox' id='242' coor='0,0,412,112' style='50020007,0' class='#FF#0080'&gt;</bpt>
</seg>


produces

<term>
                </term>

but

<seg><it>&lt;/Title&gt;</it>
<bpt i="1" type="struct">&lt;Elt type='Groupbox' id='242' coor='0,0,412,112' style='50020007,0'
class='#FF#0080'&gt;</bpt></seg>


produces

<term>>&lt;/Title&gt;</term>

If I understand your requirement it is to ignore any seg elements with
element content, but to make a term element for those that have non
white space text content.

so just

<xsl:apply-templates select="seg"/>

with

<xsl:template match="seg[*]"/>

<xsl:template match="seg[not(normalize-space(.))]"/>

<xsl:template match="seg">
 <text><xsl:value-of select="."/></text>
</xsl:template>

David

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