Trim whitespace from parent element only

Question

I\'d like to trim the leading whitespace inside p tags in XML, so this:

  Hey, italics and italics!         


        

Answer 1

I would do something like this:

This will strip left space from the initial node child of a

element, if it is a text node. It will not strip space from the first text node child, if it is not the first node child. E.g. in

Hey there

I intentionally avoid stripping the space from the front of 'there', because that would make the words run together when rendered in a browser. If you did want to strip that space, change the match pattern to

match="p/text()[1]"

If you also want to strip trailing whitespace, as your title possibly implies, add these two templates:

The definitions of the left-trim and right-trim templates are at Trim Template for XSLT (untested). They might be slow for documents with lots of

s. If you can use XSLT 2.0, you can replace the call-templates with

and

(Thanks to Priscilla Walmsley.)