How can I trim space in XSLT without replacing repating whitespaces by single ones?

Question

The function normalize-space replaces sequences of whitespaces by a single space and trims the provided string. How can I only trim the string without the repla

Answer 1

Using FXSL (open source library for XSLT functional programming, written entirely in XSLT) one simply writes:

  

  
  
    '
        
    '
  

When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document:

    To get more information look at:     www.example.com 

the wanted, correct result is produced:

'To get more information look at:     www.example.com'

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How does the trim template work?

It trims the left leading whitespace, then it reverses the resulting string and trims its leading whitespace, then it finally reverses the resulting string.

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II. XPath 2.0 solution:

Use:

replace(replace(/*/description, '^\s*(.+?)\s*$', '$1'), '^ .*$', '')

Here is an XSLT - 2.0 - based verification:

    

 
     ""
 

When this transformation is applied on the provided XML document (above), the XPath expression is evaluated and the result of this evaluation is copied to the output:

 "To get more information look at:     www.example.com"