Question

How can I check if a XML node contains text, or only empty nodes?

Example: Let’s say we have the following XML:

<text>
   <p> </p>
   <p> </p>
</text>

(Note the whitespace between the p tags)

In a different XML, we have the following XML:

<text>
   <p>Hello World!</p>
</text>

I’d like the test to pass in the second example, but not in the first, as the second example contains text, but the first contains empty nodes.

Is there a way to easily achieve this?

(I use XSLT 2.0.)

Answer 1

If you put

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

at the top of your style sheet then the parser will ignore text nodes in your input document that consist entirely of whitespace. Among other things this means that your example p elements with spaces will be treated the same as completely empty ones. For example a template matching text[p/text()] would match the text element in your second example but not ones whose p children are all empty (or contain only space).