Whitespace

• Whitespace between XML elements is treated as a node containing only whitespace
  
• Whitespace within a text value is part of the value and is not represented by a whitespace node

• Whitespace nodes in an XSLT document are ignored
  

Whitespace characters

• Space:  
• Tab: 	
• Carriage return: 
• New line: 

  

Non-whitespace characters

• Non-breaking space:     ( )

xsl:strip-space

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

• Removes whitespace nodes
• elements attribute: Whitespace-separated list of elements

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

xsl:preserve-space

<xsl:preserve-space elements="..."/>

• Keeps whitespace nodes
• elements attribute: Whitespace-separated list of elements

• Whether preserve-space overrides strip-space or vice-versa is determined by which has the greater specifity:

name, ns:name         0
ns:*                 -0.25
*                    -0.5

xml:space

... xml:space="<preserve,strip,default>" ...

• Attribute
• Overrides strip-space and preserve-space (unless default is specified)
  

normalize-space()

normalize-space(...)

• Function
• Removes redundant whitespace
• Converts all sequences of whitespace to a single blankspace
• Used in select expressions

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