XSLT- normalize non-breaking whitespace characters

Question

I have a sample xml file like this,

    
text1 text2  
    
text1 text2     
    
text1 text2   

        

Answer 1

You could do:

<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(translate(., '&#160;', ' '))"/>

This will work in XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 alike.

---

In XSLT 2.0, you could also use regex - for example:

<xsl:value-of select="replace(., '[\t\p{Zs}]', '')"/>

will remove the horizontal tab character as well as any character in the Unicode Space_Separator category, which includes not only the space and non-breaking space characters but also other space characters. Documentation is hard to find, but I believe this is currently the complete list: (extracted from http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt):

  SPACE
  NO-BREAK SPACE
  OGHAM SPACE MARK
  EN QUAD
  EM QUAD
  EN SPACE
  EM SPACE
  THREE-PER-EM SPACE
  FOUR-PER-EM SPACE
  SIX-PER-EM SPACE
  FIGURE SPACE
  PUNCTUATION SPACE
  THIN SPACE
  HAIR SPACE
  NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
  MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
　 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE

𐲰 OLD HUNGARIAN CAPITAL LETTER EZS
𐳰 OLD HUNGARIAN SMALL LETTER EZS
𖼶 MIAO LETTER ZSHA
𖼼 MIAO LETTER ZSA
𖼾 MIAO LETTER ZZSA
𖽁 MIAO LETTER ZZSYA

However, testing with Saxon 9.5 shows that the last 6 characters are not recognized: http://xsltransform.net/ncntCSo