XSLT: Remove excess whitespace characters preserving nodes

Question

So my problem is this. I have a transform document which is used in many places, and generically handles a lot of small formatting transforms. In one specific case, I need t

Answer 1

When you use normalize-space then only the text-value of your fragment is used and thus sub-nodes are stripped. You'd have to put the normalize-space into templates for the sub-nodes as well (those that are applied by your <xsl:apply-templates/>

Answer 2

I've got two options:

If the \n it not literal then do this:

<xsl:template match="text()[ancestor-or-self::no_whitespace]">
    <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
</xsl:template>

to clean up all white space at and below the no_whitespace tag.

If the \n is a literal in the string then its get a bit more complex to get rid of the \n. Use this:

<xsl:template name="strip_newline">
    <xsl:param name="string"/>
    <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($string,'\n')"/>
    <xsl:variable name="rhs" select="substring-after($string,'\n')"/>
    <xsl:if test="$rhs">
        <xsl:call-template name="strip_newline">
            <xsl:with-param name="string" select="$rhs"/>
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()[ancestor-or-self::no_whitespace]">
    <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="text()[ancestor-or-self::no_whitespace][contains(.,'\n')]">
    <xsl:variable name="cleantext">
        <xsl:call-template name="strip_newline">
            <xsl:with-param name="string" select="."/>
        </xsl:call-template>
    </xsl:variable>
    <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space($cleantext)"/>
</xsl:template>

In both cases, I'm assuming you already have an identity template in place elsewhere in you xsl:

<xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

Answer 3

It cound just indentation in the output. Do you have <xsl:output indent="yes"/> at the top of you xsl? Or maybe the processor is enforceing indentation. Using <xsl:output indent="no"/> should soak up all the \n and indentation.