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Controlling White Space with XSLT

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Any Extensible Markup Language (XML) document exercises some control over white space. The parser handles white space in an XML document according to the xml:space attribute and default white space rules before the document is even accessed by the XSL Transformations (XSLT) processor.

The XML 1.0 specification imposes the following white space rules.

  • Because different operating systems represent line breaks in different ways, as true newlines, carriage returns, linefeed-carriage return character pairs, and so on, any newline characters specific to an operating system are normalized by the parser to a true newline (hex x0A, or decimal 10).

  • The values of attributes, other than CDATA-type attributes, are normalized by replacing multiple consecutive occurrences of white space with a single space. For example, an attribute value such as "text    text" with four intervening spaces embedded in the attribute value is passed from the parser as "text text"; the multiple spaces in the original value are replaced with a single space.

    **Note   **If an xml:space attribute in the source XML document or style sheet conflicts with explicit XSLT white space handling, the behavior associated with that xml:space attribute always takes precedence.

According to the XSLT specification, the XSLT processor merges adjacent text nodes into a single text node. This release of the Microsoft® XSLT processor does not implement this feature. If a text node, following any merging that occurs, consists of white space only, the containing element is compared to the list of elements in any <xsl:strip-space> elements in the style sheet. If the containing element appears in such a list, the white-space-only text node is removed from the result tree.

This applies only to insignificant white space, that is, white space between, not within, elements. Use the XSLT normalize-space() function to normalize white space within elements.

**Note   **White space is handled by the Microsoft® XML Parser (MSXML) for Windows CE .NET as a whole by its built-in parser as well as its built-in XSLT processor. For more information, see How the MSXML Processor Handles White Space.

See Also

What is White Space? | How the MSXML Processor Handles White Space | Controlling White Space with <xsl:text> | Preserving and Stripping White Space | <xsl:preserve-space> and <xsl:strip-space> Example | Overriding <xsl:preserve-space> and <xsl:strip-space> | Creating CDATA Sections | Using the Normalize-space() Function | Controlling White Space with the DOM | preserveWhiteSpace Property and HTML | Effects of White Space in the Style Sheet | Release Notes: Handling White Space with the MSXML Processor

 Last updated on Saturday, April 10, 2004

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