Re: [xsl] stripping leading and trailing blanks of a value?

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2010-03-09 18:05 +0100, Ben Stover wrote:
> Assume I have a XML doc where occasionally values appear with 
> leading and trailing blanks similar to
>
> <aaa>
> <bbb>
> '3 blanks'somevalue'4 blanks'
> </bbb>
> </aaa>
>
> Because blanks are probably removed by the mailing list system I put 
> 'n blanks' in the code above.
> In reality real blanks are meant.
>
> So how can I strip all such leading and trailing blanks (nad line 
> breaks) with XSLT?

The normalize-space() will remove leading and trailing white-space, 
and reduce embedded sequences of white-space characters to a single space.

  translate(normalize-space($value),' ','')

... will remove those embedded single spaces as well, leaving only 
non-white-space characters.

In XSLT 2 you could write:  replace($value,'\s+','')

> The stripping should applied only to "atomic" values. That means 
> that blanks between e.g.
> <aaa> and <bbb> should be kept. So the result should look like
>
> <aaa>
> <bbb>somevalue</bbb>
> </aaa>

Then you only want to apply these to those text nodes that have 
non-white-space characters.

> Moreover how can I strip all "atomic" blanks in a whole XML doc and 
> not only from a particular tag value?

During the building of the source tree you can remove all 
white-space-only text nodes by using:

  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

But be careful ... if you have:

  <aaa>
    <bbb>   </bbb>
  </aaa>

... did you want the spaces of <bbb> preserved?

If so, then something like:

  <xsl:strip-space elements="*[*]"/>

... would only strip the white-space-only text nodes from those 
elements with element children, not those elements without element 
children.  The attribute value is a match pattern.

This stripping happens during the building of the source node tree 
... you aren't informed if there were any that were stripped before 
you see the source node tree.

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . Ken

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