Saxon

Legacy ID: #4074762 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

Are you sure you have a template rule that matches the whitespace text nodes? Because you haven't shown one. I strongly suspect they are being matched by the default template rule for text nodes, whose effect is to copy the text node to the output. Incidentally the standard way to strip whitespace text nodes from the source document in XSLT is <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>. Saxon provides the -sall option mainly for XQuery which doesn't have any equivalent.

Legacy ID: #4079432 Legacy Poster: eb44 (eb44)

MK -- thank you for your reply. You can tell I'm not very experienced and I appreciate the tip on whitespace-stripping. Regarding a template for matching whitespace text nodes, I thought that I did show one: <xsl:template match="*"></xsl:template> My understanding was that this would match any node that wasn't covered by a more specific matching rule, and overrides the default rule. If that's the case, then I would have expected many nodes to be completely "ignored" because there is nothing between the opening and closing template tags. If this template is NOT matching other nodes, or if the match is still causing values to be copied to the output, then I need to do some (more!) homework in order to understand xslt rules. Again, many thanks for your utility and your time.

Legacy ID: #4079685 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

The template rule <xsl:template match="*"></xsl:template> doesn't match text nodes, it matches element nodes only. When you do <xsl:apply-templates/> in your match="Record" template rule, it processes all the child nodes of the Record element. These include further elements, for which you provide template rules, and whitespace text nodes, which are processed by the built-in template rule for text nodes. The built-in template rule copies text nodes unchanged to the result tree.

Legacy ID: #4079900 Legacy Poster: eb44 (eb44)

Thank you. That helps a lot. I didn't understand the difference between "element" and "text" nodes, but it's making more sense now. FYI, I had started with an interactive-only translator (Architag's XRay), which did (incorrectly, it appears) suppress the unwanted whitespace text nodes as a result of the element-match "*" template. So I was confused about the difference in behavior between their engine and yours. Sounds like it's time for me to pick up a book on XSLT...I bet you have a recommendation! Is your 2004 book the way to go, or will there be an update coming in the not-too-distant future. I appreciate your time and patience.