Re: White space control when formatting for ascii text

[Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 17 Oct 2000 15:29 -0400, Rick Anderson wrote:
 > I'm attempting to transform some xml into nicely formatted ascii style
 > text instead of to html.  I've been using tabs to align my columns but
 > sometimes I get extra tabs. I don't know why.
 > 
 > It seems to be very difficult to control the white space in the style
 > sheet.  Is there a way to make the white space more visibile for better
 > debugging? 

Your problem isn't with the stylesheet, it's with your data.

The <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> in your stylesheet strips any
whitespace-only text nodes in your XML, but your XML has several text
nodes that end with a line feed and some spaces or a tab:

 >       <desc>Global unique identifier for a person.
 >       </desc>

Either put the end tags after the last printing character:

         <desc>Global unique identifier for a person.</desc>

or, in your stylesheet, normalize the spaces in your <desc> elements
to both remove leading and trailing whitespace and collapse multiple
spaces between words into single spaces:

<xsl:template match="desc">
  <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()"/>
</xsl:template>

Regards,


Tony Graham
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Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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