XSLT - remove whitespace from template

Question

I am using XML to store a small contact list and trying to write a XSL template that will transform it into a CSV file. The problem I am having is with whitespace in the out

Answer 1

In XSLT, white-space is preserved by default, since it can very well be relevant data.

The best way to prevent unwanted white-space in the output is not to create it in the first place. Don't do:

  foo

because that's "\n··foo\n", from the processor's point of view. Rather do

  foo

White-space in the stylesheet is ignored as long as it occurs between XML elements only. Simply put: never use "naked" text anywhere in your XSLT code, always enclose it in an element.

Also, using an unspecific:

is problematic, because the default XSLT rule for text nodes says "copy them to the output". This applies to "white-space-only" nodes as well. For instance:

   value 

contains three text nodes:

1. "\n··" (right after )
2. "·value·"
3. "\n" (right before )

To avoid that #1 and #3 sneak into the output (which is the most common reason for unwanted spaces), you can override the default rule for text nodes by declaring an empty template:

All text nodes are now muted and text output must be created explicitly:

To remove white-space from a value, you could use the normalize-space() XSLT function:

But careful, since the function normalizes any white-space found in the string, e.g. "·value··1·" would become "value·1".

Additionally you can use the and elements, though usually this is not necessary (and personally, I prefer explicit white-space handling as indicated above).