How to display invisible linebreaks in XML using XSLT1.0

Question

This is what is displayed in my XML output (note the line breaks)

<root>
<Item type="Comment">
<comment>this is a test 
this is a test 
this is a test</comment>
</Item>
</root>

In my stylesheet

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:user="urn:user-scripts">
<xsl:output method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes" standalone="yes" indent="yes" cdata-section-elements="script msxsl:script"/>


<xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/Root">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="Item"/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="Item[@type='Comment']"> 

    <html>
        <head>
            <title>
                Comment: <xsl:value-of select="comment_no"/>
            </title>
        </head>
        <style>
            * {
            font-family: "Arial", sans-serif;
            font-size: 10pt;
            }
            body {
            min-width: 775px;
            max-width: 775px;
            margin-left: auto;
            margin-right: auto;
            }
            td {
            padding: 0px;
            }
            .layoutTable {
            width: 100%;
            }
            .fieldValue {
            width: 99%;
            padding-left: 7px;
            }
            .layoutTable {
            width: 100%;
            }
            div.layoutBin {
            page-break-inside: avoid;
            overflow: hidden;
            border: solid;
            border-width: 1px;
            margin-bottom: 10px;
            padding-left: 3px;
            padding-right: 3px;
            }
        </style>

        <body>
            <div class="layoutBin" id="keyInfo">
                <div class="left" style="width: 25%">
                    <table class="layoutTable">
                        <tr>
                            <td class="fieldValue">
                                <xsl:value-of select="comment"/>
                            </td>
                        </tr>
                    </table>
                </div>    
            </div>
        </body>
    </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The line breaks are removed and my browser displays the result in a single line instead.

How do I preserve/display the line breaks?

Please edit your Q to say what xslt engine and version are you using. Good luck. — shellter, Dec 29 '15 at 23:27
Please post a **reproducible** example, including a **complete** stylesheet. Line breaks will **not** be removed using your example - but if you are outputting HTML, they will not be rendered by a browser. — michael.hor257k, Dec 29 '15 at 23:31
Same question was already asked: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3309746/how-to-convert-newline-into-br-with-xslt — Über Lem, Dec 30 '15 at 16:14
Can you show me how that can be applied to my example? I am completely lost looking at the suggested solution from that post (total rookie here) — User1218, Dec 30 '15 at 17:25

user52889 · Answer 1 · 2015-12-30T16:19:44.010

In HTML, line breaks are not normally significant. They're treated the same way as other white space - turned into a single word space. As such, you can't tell from looking at the page whether there's a literal line break in the DOM.

You have several options:

Use CSS' white-space: pre; or white-space: pre-wrap;. (this is the easiest, given you're already writing your own CSS). Beware: This will also make all the other text you're inserting significant, so you might want to use xsl:text tags.
Process text nodes to insert a (self-closing) HTML br tag in place of line-break characters.
Process text nodes to split them into HTML divs (or paragraphs or similar)

Which you choose depends on what you want to do with the text.

The xsl:preserve-space element might initially appear to be what you're looking for. Put it at the top of your stylesheet with the space-separated list of elements whose whitespace you want preserved verbatim - however it's only necessary if you used xsl:strip-space, which it looks like you haven't.

`xsl:strip-space` and `xsl:preserve-space` deal with text nodes that contain **only** whitespace characters - therefore are irrelevant here. — michael.hor257k, Dec 30 '15 at 17:27
The CSS option didn't seem to change anything. Not sure how to execute #2 and #3 - how do I write the xsl code for that? — User1218, Dec 30 '15 at 19:52

How to display invisible linebreaks in XML using XSLT1.0

1 Answers1