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Re: Normalizing spaces?


Hmmm.  The behavior I asked about was the "normalization" (possibly not the right word) of spaces  in element content (specifically, although not limited to, <para> elements), in the SGML version of DocBook processed with the Modular DSSSL Style Sheets.

I observe that multiple whitespace characters (newline, tab, and space) show up in the output file as a single space character.  This behavior is not universally present (i.e. in other DTD and other style sheets, such concatenation is not observed).  I'm   trying to understand how this works.

I haven't found anything useful by examining the style sheet sources, nor has an index search of the DSSSL standard been helpful.  In specific response to Jirka's comment, there does not appear to be a "normalize-space()" function in DSSSL, although there can be a NORMDEF (somewhere :-) which defines a string normalization rule.  That may be relevant, although it's in the chapter on groves, which is not the most obvious part  of that specification :-).

At 11:18 AM 5/8/01 +0200, Jirka Kosek wrote:
Eric Richardson wrote:
> Maybe somebody can comment on whitespace since I have mouthed off
> without thinking first and passed off such lousy advice.

In XML whitespaces are normalized only in attribute values. Not in
element content. In XSLT you can normalize spaces manualy using
normalize-space() function, I think that function normalize is also
available in DSSSL.

Extra text nodes containing only white-spaces can be removed from source
tree in XSLT by using <xsl:strip-space elements="space seperated list of
elements from which white-space nodes should be stripped">.
 

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  Jirka Kosek                       
  e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz
  http://www.kosek.cz

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Mark B. Wroth
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