Question

I have a input XML like this :

<in_xml>
 <company>
  <project>
    ProjNo1
    ProjNo2
    ProjNo3
  </project>
 </company>
</in_xml>

A simple XSLT is applied to this source, which writes another XML with the value of Project Tag.
The Project tag in input xml has three lines , it could be one or more line(s). I am looking at way for the XSLT to read only the first line, in case there are more than one and write the first line in the output xml.
The current XSLT is very simple as it just reads the Project tag and spits out the value, hence the code is not attached.

Regards.

I have added the answer to the question, see below @Maestro’s answer.

Answer 1

If you are in the happy circumstances of being able to apply XSLT 2.0, the following may help:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text"/>
    <xsl:template match="//project/text()">
        <xsl:value-of select="tokenize(normalize-space(.),' ')[1]" />
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Explanation: first normalize-space() to replace all whitespace strings by a single blank (and cut off leading and trailing whitespace), then split into words, then take the first one.

In XSLT 1.0 you could use

<xsl:value-of select="substring-before(normalize-space(.), ' ')"/>

instead. Less flexible if the second word has to be selected, but for the first word it works OK.

EDIT

you asked how to retrieve a first line in XSLT 1.0 – problem here is the leading whitespace which may contain a LF so you cannot just substring-before the first LF.
The below can probably be improved upon, but it works fine:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text"/>
    <xsl:template match="//project/text()">
        <xsl:variable name="afterLeadingWS"
select="substring-after(., substring-before(.,substring-before(normalize-space(.), ' ')))"/>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains($afterLeadingWS, '&#xA;')">
                 <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($afterLeadingWS, '&#xA;')"/>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                 <xsl:value-of select="$afterLeadingWS"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Explanation: first get first word as before, then determine the whitespace before that first word, then get everything after that leading whitespace, then get the first line, which is the string before a LF character. It may just happen that there is no LF except maybe in the leading whitespace, hence the choose function.