Question

Not too sure how I should properly describe the issue, but what I’m facing is the following. I have quite some whitespace content in files that was originally html. I want to remove this and the easiest way to deal with this is using an identity template and add the following

    <xsl:template match="text()">
    <xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(.)"/>
</xsl:template>

Works fine, but a bit too well. Assume following example :

<p>    some content with whitespaces and a <a href="some_link">link</a> and some <strong>text</strong>

If I use the identity template my result of course
looks like

 <p>some content with whitespaces and a<a href="some_link">link</a>and some<strong>text</strong>

but I’d like to preserve the whitespace in front of my a and strong tags (or basically any tag within a ‘final’ string. Since these content can be in quite some tags (divs, anchors, whatever) building exceptions might work but would become pretty complex as I would need to have a template-match loop for all tags that can live inside another one and add spaces again after initial cleanup.

Any easier way to approach this ?

Thanks in advance again !

Answer 1

Perhaps

<xsl:template match="text()">
  <xsl:value-of select="concat(
    if (starts-with(., ' ') and preceding-sibling::node()[1][self::*]) then ' ' else '',
    normalize-space(.),
    if (ends-with(., ' ') and following-sibling::node()[1][self::*]) then ' ' else '')"/>
</xsl:template>