Re: How to retain the end tag when outputting an empty

If you just need specific elements serialised this way rather than change
them all you can  give the element content that serialises to nothing, eg

<xsl:stylesheet version="3.0" xmlns:xsl="
http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:character-map name = "emptytag">
  <xsl:output-character character = "X" string = "" />
 </xsl:character-map>
 <xsl:output use-character-maps="emptytag"/>

 <xsl:template match="/">
 1 <aaa></aaa>
 2 <aaa>X</aaa>
 </xsl:template>

 </xsl:stylesheet>

which if run on itself produces

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 1 <aaa/>
 2 <aaa></aaa>

of course you can replace X by any character not otherwise used, such as a
private use or unallocated Unicode codepoint

David

On Fri, 17 Jun 2022 at 18:25, Bauman, Syd s.bauman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <
xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> MK> <test></test> is the canonical form. I've no idea why. Perhaps
> because it's simpler, in the sense that all elements are serialized the
> same way regardless of whether or not they are empty. (With no need for
> special rules about edge cases, like elements that are empty except for
> comments).
>
> I do not know why, either, but I have always presumed exactly the reasons
> you state. Why? Because I would do it that way for those reasons.
>
>
> As for Rogerbs original question, I am fond of lying to my students,
> telling them that whether an XML processor writes b<duck/>b or
> b<duck></duck>b is up to the processor; since they are the same as far
as
> XML is concerned, you (the human) do not get to say which you want. (I
> typically confess this oversimplification later in the course, explaining
> that a processor does not *have* to give you a choice, but it is welcome
> to, and some do.)
>
> Using this (admittedly simplified) theory of XML processing, though, the
> answer to bhow to get <duck></duck> instead of <duck/>b is
> $ perl -pe 's,<([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9._-]+)/>,<$1></$1>,g;' < INPUT.xml >
> OUTPUT.xml
> or similar.
>
> (Where the regular expression I use here is one that will match all TEI
> element names without a namespace prefix, and obviously may need to be
> adjusted for other use cases.)
>
> Note, of course, that this non-XML solution changes b<!-- do not use
> "<blort/>", use "<blort></blort>" instead -->b into the hilariously
> difficult to figure out b<!-- do not use "<blort></blort>", use
> "<blort></blort>" instead -->b. p
>
>
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