Re: Where did my tabs go? Trying to understand xsl:va

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Subject: Re: Where did my tabs go? Trying to understand xsl:value-of, tabs and the separator attribute
From: Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:53:45 +0200

David Carlisle wrote:

(no tabs) <xsl:value-of select="somenode" separator="{&tab;}" />
That one's an error: the &tab; is expanded before xslt starts so it is an AVT where the expression in {} is just a tab character which isn't a legal xpath expression.

Ouch, that hurts! Cut 'n' paste typo and I thought to have checked them all. Well, I meant "{'&tab;'}" ;-)

<!DOCTYPE x [ <!ENTITY tab "	" > <!ENTITY tab2 "&#x09;" > ]>

This is where I fell asleep during the lesson last year ;-) I'm sure I saw this before. Thanks! Now it works as I expect it to. I can even use the character map, so as to prevent the tabs to be re-interpreted when I micro-pipeline some data, or use a normalize-space somewhere too often.

isn't white space fun??

Haha. Nightmarish fun, yes. Some day in ancient history, I thought I had it all figured out. But recently we started redesigning some of the xslt libraries and we messed up big time in these corner areas of whitespace handling.

I am sure this issue also has to do with the way I am mistreating newline characters.

One more question that I still don't get. If XML parses these entities before it gets to XSLT, and if XML has predefined entities & < &gt ' and " why can't I use the following to the same success?

<!DOCTYPE x [
   <!ENTITY tab "&#x09;" >
   <!ENTITY tab2 "&amp;#x09;" >
]>

It will produce '	' where you previously got ' ' (tab).

Hmm, thinking out loud here: if I get rid of that character map, and I stick to the lovely &tab; (defined as your &tab2;), do I risk loosing the tab characters in the output stream when I tossle and hossle them hence and forth through my templates during a single pass? Meaning, can normalize-space, strip-space, xsl:value-of, xsl:variable + pipelining, xsl:function etc be a spoil-sport for me? (if so, character maps are safer, if not, I can as well get rid of them)

Cheers and thanks!
-- Abel Braaksma
   http://www.nuntia.com

Current Thread
Where did my tabs go? Trying to understand xsl:value-of, tabs and the separator attribute Abel Braaksma - 16 Oct 2006 18:11:56 -0000 David Carlisle - 16 Oct 2006 18:33:48 -0000 Abel Braaksma - 16 Oct 2006 18:54:21 -0000 <= David Carlisle - 16 Oct 2006 19:04:34 -0000 Abel Braaksma - 16 Oct 2006 21:20:51 -0000 David Carlisle - 17 Oct 2006 08:45:40 -0000

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