Re: [xsl] Correcting misplaced spaces in XML documents

["Chris Papademetrious christopher.papademetrious@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Trevor,

We have similar occurrences in our DITA source. And like you, I got lost in
conditionals trying to implement a comprehensive solution.

Sometimes the spaces are multiple element-levels deep:

<p> This <A>is <B>some </B></A>text.</p>

I don't have a solution for this yet, but I would like to solve it some day.
One idea is to implement a recursive or iterative approach that bubbles the
spaces upward, one level at a time. This template could be called on "scope
elements" (credit goes to Gerrit for this term), beyond which spaces should
not bubble, so that they would naturally stop when they reach the surface. And
fortunately, XSLT "heals" multiple text nodes together (I think?), so
subsequent recursions or iterations don't need to concatenate bubbled-up text
nodes with their neighbors to understand what's going on.


Hi Gerrit,

Thanks for sharing your
emphasis-normalize-space<https://github.com/gimsieke/emphasis-normalize-space>
solution! Your code was clean with lots of comments, and I like how you
parameterized everything.


  *   Chris

From: Trevor Nicholls trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2023 9:34 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] Correcting misplaced spaces in XML documents

I suppose this falls into the category of data cleanup.

In the very simple case I am importing documents which have content like
this:

    <para>Press the<keyname> Escape </keyname>key.</para>

You'll notice that the adjacent spaces are wrapped in the keyname element when
they should just be adjacent to it, not in it.
This is a pathological case, usually the keyname is correct, but occasionally
there is a leading or a trailing space, hardly ever both.

I've written a simple stylesheet which corrects this situation, identifying
leading and trailing whitespace, and outputting the appropriate breakdown:

  <xsl:template match="keyname">
    <xsl:variable name="leading">...</xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="trailing">...</xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="content">...</xsl:variable>
    <xsl:if test="$leading" != ''><xsl:value-of select="$leading"/></xsl:if>
    <xsl:element name="keyname">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
      <xsl:value-of select="$content" />
   </xsl:element>
    <xsl:if test="$trailing" != ''><xsl:value-of
select="$trailing"/></xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

This is all fine, and it's adequate for the job when the "greedy" elements
only contain text, which is the case for keynames.

However now I want to extend the stylesheet to correct some other cases where
the content model of the element is not just simple text.
For example:

  <para>Select the<filename> <var>username</var>.profile
</filename>file.</para>

Although the cases I am looking at right now only have a content model of text
or <var> elements, a more general solution would be welcome because other
cases are going to turn up where elements are nested two or three levels
deep.

I've got myself neck deep into conditionals trying to extend my simple
template to cope with this, and I'm sure there's a straightforward way of
doing it that doesn't need several hundred lines of code.

Can anyone point me to a cleaner way of doing it?

cheers
T

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