Test character immediately preceding node

Is it possible to test a character immediately preceding a node? I
have an element with child-elements, my trouble is that sometimes
there is a space before the child-element, sometimes not. For example
I might have:

<unittitle>Statements <unitdate>2001</unitdate></unittitle>
or
<unittitle>Statements<unitdate>2001</unitdate></unittitle>

The XSLT that I'm forking from has instructions to insert a space
before <unitdate>, which sometimes results in two spaces in the
output. I'd like to use an xsl:choose to test for a space immediately
preceding <unitdate>. Is this possible? I'm using XSLT 2.0.

Thanks,
Nathan