Re: [xsl] XSLT to remove characters and whitespaces

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Georg,

A couple of things:

I'm unsure of why you are normalizing the spaces after converting CRs 
and tabs to spaces, and stripping line feeds, with translate() (in 
two separate operations). Why not simply normalize the spaces, since 
that takes care of line feeds and tabs? (The parser should already 
have normalized CRs away so they shouldn't even be there.)

More basically, and this is what accounts for your problem: you are 
matching elements, creating new elements with the same names (any 
reason not to use the simpler xsl:copy instruction?), writing out 
their string values (i.e. all the text inside the elements) and then 
descending the tree to do the same. This results in your string 
values being written out over and over again, every time an ancestor 
element gets processed.

So if your input were

<greeting>
  <to>Georg</to>
  <from>XSL-List</from>
  <text>Hey, how are tricks?</text>
</greeting>

you'll get

<greeting>GeorgXSL-ListHey, how are tricks?
  <to>Georg</to>
  <from>XSL-List</from>
  <text>Hey, how are tricks?</text>
</greeting>

since the greeting element gets its text value copied before its own 
element contents are traversed.

Instead of this, you only want to normalize values of the *text* 
nodes, letting element nodes take care of themselves ... so:

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

<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

... as you can see, fairly simple, and a garden-variety near-identity 
transform.

Cheers,
Wendell

 At 06:33 AM 7/7/2006, you wrote:
> Hello,
>
> i have a xml file with some content in it which contains some unwanted
> carriage returns and whitespaces. Now I'm trying to write a stylesheet
> which makes an exact copy of the source file but without the returns
> and whitespaces. I thought this should work:
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" 
> xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
> <xsl:output name="stripped" method="xml" version="1.0"
> encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
> <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
> <xsl:template match="/">
>   <xsl:result-document format="stripped" href="result.xml">
>      <xsl:apply-templates/>
>   </xsl:result-document>
> </xsl:template>
> <xsl:template match="*">
>   <xsl:element name="{name()}">
>      <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(translate(translate(.,
> '&#x0d;&#x0a;', ' '), '&#09;', ' '))"/>
>   <xsl:apply-templates/>
>   </xsl:element>
> </xsl:template>
> </xsl:stylesheet>
>
> But the output is a mess in parts. What am I doing wrong?