Question

I am trying to remove the break tags from a string in xslt1.0. I tried using translate(s,’&ltbr>’,”) where s is string value but that removes the bold tags also. Also tried a template but had no luck.
My question is how to remove the break tags only.

So the string:

<b>trying</b> to remove <br> tags only <br> and not <b>bold tags</b>

would be parsed as:

<b>trying</b> to remove tags only and not <b>bold tags</b>

Answer 1

This XSLT:

    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

<xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match=
    "br[not(@*|*|comment()|processing-instruction()) 
    and normalize-space()=''
    ]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

applied to this well-formed, valid XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<list>
<b>trying</b> to remove <br/> tags only <br/> and not <b>bold tags</b>
</list>

gives this result:

<list>
<b>trying</b> to remove  tags only  and not <b>bold tags</b>
</list>

Also refer to Dimitre’s solution here:
Removing empty tags from XML via XSLT