Question

I have a xml code that can ahve two forms :

Form 1

<?xml version="1.0">
<info>
</info>

Form 2

<?xml version="1.0">
<info>
  <a href="http://server.com/foo">bar</a>
  <a href="http://server.com/foo">bar</a>
</info>

From a loop I read each form of xml and pass it to an xslt stylesheet.

XSLT code

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*" />

    <xsl:template match="*|@*|text()">
       <xsl:apply-templates select="/info/a"/>
    </xsl:template> 

    <xsl:template match="a">
       <xsl:value-of select="concat(text(), ' ', @href)"/>
       <xsl:text>&#13;</xsl:text>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

And I obtain this :

bar http://server.com/foo
bar http://server.com/foo

How can i remove the first empty line with XSLT only ?

Answer 1

From a loop I read each form of xml and pass it to an xslt stylesheet.

May be from your application the execution of the stylesheet on an empty form (Form 1) causes this. Try to handle this by executing the stylesheet only whether the form is not empty.

Furthermore you may want change your stylesheet into this one:

<xsl:stylesheet 
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
    version="2.0">

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

    <xsl:template match="info/a">
        <xsl:value-of select="concat(normalize-space(.), 
            ' ',
            normalize-space(@href))"/>
            <xsl:if test="follwing-sibling::a">
             <xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text>
            </xsl:if>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Where normalize-space() is used to ensure that your input data has no unwanted spaces.