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[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: XSLT: check if value is whitespace(s)
 I get upset by people spelling "whitespace" as two words, as if it described that subset of spaces that are white (as distinct from those that are green or blue). In fact, of course, there are four whitespace characters and only one space character. There are other characters whose rendition uses no ink, and which also use the word "space" in their names, that are neither space nor whitespace characters, for example zero-width-space. The problem comes with the territory. The OP hasn't actually said what he means by "whitespace", and the alignment of his requirement with the XSLT definition of whitespace (the four characters CR, LF, tab and space? but CR has been normalized to LF by the parser, so aren't we talking three characters?) is actually unclear until he does; but he doesn't know he needs to do this if he doesn't even know XSLT *has* a definition for whitespace, which may (or may not) be relevant to his problem depending on how it aligns. Personally, my pet peeve is the common expectation that others' perception of a problem is necessarily the same as one's own, and that therefore we can casually say things like "whitespace" and just assume it's clear what we mean (and if it's not, it's the other party's fault). Sometimes it is, sometimes not -- and sometimes we have to dig to find out which. The most constructive posts to this list (conspicuously those from Mike) exhibit sensitivity to exactly this meta-problem and care in dealing with it. Well-posed questions demonstrate the same sensitivity. But it isn't always easy to guess where perceptions or assumptions may not align, which is why we can't stop taking care, because others won't always be able to. (The advantage of a list like this, of course, it that it is a venue where we can take precisely this care. If this weren't useful we could all just read XSLT: A Programmer's Reference cover to cover and be done with it.) It is natural, however, sometimes, to get impatient and just cut to the chase, hoping we're all on the same page. So the answer is, if your definition of whitespace is the same as XSLT's, then the XPath function normalize-space() will do what you want (as David shows). If not, then a technique like what M. David demonstrates with translate() will work as well. As it turns out, XSLT and XPath's definition of whitespace kicks it back to XML [section 2.3], which defines it as any combination of the characters (#x20 | #x9 | #xD | #xA), that is, space, tab, CR, LF. Cheers, Wendell
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