XSL Strip Padding

Question

Is there a simple way to strip padding, IE leading and/or trailing white space. EXSLT padding function seems to only create padding or trim strings to a certain length.

What is "strip-padding"? please, edit your question and give a concrete example of what you want! — Dimitre Novatchev, Sep 08 '10 at 13:22
About white space handling there is more than one scenario... See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184431/converting-xml-to-plain-text-using-xslt-how-should-i-ignore-handle-whitespace/185048#185048 — , Sep 08 '10 at 13:35

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 08 '10 at 13:27

1

Would normalize-space() do the job for you? This will also reduce spaces inside the string, e.g.

"  this         string    "

would become:

"this string"

If you really need a "trim" function, you can probably steal one from someone else who's already implemented it with normalizse-space()...

answered Sep 08 '10 at 13:27

Matt Gibson

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Or one could use the replace function (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions/#func-replace). It should work more or less (i.e. it's untested) like this: `replace(string, '^\s*(.*?)\s*$', '')`. – musiKk Sep 08 '10 at 13:38

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 08 '10 at 13:27

1

Try normalize-space

<xsl:value-of select='normalize-space(string)'/>

answered Sep 08 '10 at 13:27

StuartLC

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 08 '10 at 13:43

It isn't clear what is wanted -- what is "strip padding"?

If you meant the trim() function, then

The FXSL library provides a convenient trim template function.

This transformation:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

  <xsl:import href="trim.xsl"/>

  <xsl:output method="text"/>
  <xsl:template match="/">
    '<xsl:call-template name="trim">
        <xsl:with-param name="pStr" select="string(/*)"/>
    </xsl:call-template>'
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when applied on this XML document:

<someText>

   This is    some text   

</someText>

produces the wanted, correct result:

'This is    some text'

XSL Strip Padding

3 Answers3