Hiding an element that contains only spaces using CSS

Question

I am trying to hide the following element in an automatically generated HTML document:

Answer 1

Here is my solution which I just implemented for a client using jQuery 1.5.x - you might have to adjust the //skip empty tags but which are valid regular expression string.

$('*:only-child:empty').each(
    function(index) {
        var currentElement = $(this);
        // skip singleton tags
        if(/^(?:area|br|col|embed|hr|img|input|link|meta|param)$/i.test(currentElement.get(0).tagName) == true) {
                return
        }
        // skip empty tags but which are valid
        if(/^(?:textarea)$/i.test(currentElement.get(0).tagName) == true) {
                return
        }
        while (currentElement.parent().children().length == 1) {
            currentElement = currentElement.parent();
        }
        // so 0 or more children for the parent then we hide it
        // we will never have more then 0 children though the :empty takes care of that
        console.log('hidding: ' + currentElement);
        currentElement.hide()
    }
);