XSLT provides a built-in function, normalize-space(), that strips leading and trailing white space from a string and normalizes multiple successive white space characters to a single space. It takes one argument, a string or node-set, which is converted to a string as necessary; if the argument is omitted, normalize-space()assumes the context node.

The following is an XML fragment with leading newline and tab characters following the <generouswhitespace> start tag. There are 10 trailing spaces and a newline preceding the </generouswhitespace> end tag.

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<generouswhitespace> There is a l o t of white space here! </generouswhitespace>

This fragment's white space can be normalized with the following XSLT template rule, which encloses the <generouswhitespace> element's text content in [ ] characters.

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

The output appears as follows.

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[There is a l o t of white space here!]

All leading white space has been trimmed, and each block of extraneous white space within the text node has been formatted to a single space.

See Also