Re: check for whitespace value between nodes

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Subject: Re: check for whitespace value between nodes
From: Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:02:37 -0400

Dear Dimitre,

At 12:00 PM 8/20/2010, you wrote:

In fact the expression I proposed also covers your "first definition".

Of course -- I'm sorry if I wasn't clear that a single space character would pass your test. But it doesn't do so exclusively. If "a white space" is meant to designate *only* a single character, the test (as you know) has to be tighter. And either way, we also get to worry about what that character can be. Space, tab, non-breaking space, zero-width space ...

Do note that there is only a single definition for whitespace in the
XML Recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-common-syn) :

[3] S ::= (#x20 | #x9 | #xD | #xA)+

and this is exactly what the normalize-space() function handles
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions/#func-normalize-space):

"Summary: Returns the value of $arg with whitespace normalized by
stripping leading and trailing whitespace and replacing sequences of
one or more than one whitespace character with a single space, #x20.

The whitespace characters are defined in the metasymbol S (Production
3) of [Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Recommendation (Third
Edition)]."

Certainly. (And I know you know I know this. :-)

My point (as I know you know) is that problem statements relating to whitespace in transformations -- or XML processing in general -- often do not make reference to this spec. In fact, they are often given without any awareness that such a definition exists. (The list archive will show this time and time again.)

Cheers,
Wendell


======================================================================
Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9635
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML
======================================================================

Current Thread

Re: check for whitespace value between nodes, (continued)
- Dimitre Novatchev - 19 Aug 2010 18:08:35 -0000
- Liam R E Quin - 19 Aug 2010 20:07:30 -0000
  - Wendell Piez - 20 Aug 2010 15:16:09 -0000
  - Message not available
    - Dimitre Novatchev - 20 Aug 2010 16:00:33 -0000
    - Message not available
    - Wendell Piez - 20 Aug 2010 20:11:16 -0000 <=
    - Message not available
    - Dimitre Novatchev - 20 Aug 2010 20:34:03 -0000
    - Message not available
    - Wendell Piez - 20 Aug 2010 20:56:38 -0000
    - Message not available
    - Dimitre Novatchev - 20 Aug 2010 21:37:32 -0000
    - Message not available
    - Wendell Piez - 20 Aug 2010 22:01:39 -0000

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Re: check for whitespace valu, Dimitre Novatchev	Thread	Re: check for whitespace valu, Dimitre Novatchev
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