Weird whitespace appears in TEXTAREA, why?

jacob · November 10th, 2005, 06:40 PM

Through an XSLT document I have added an HTML textarea to a form, which works, beside the fact that some whitespace charaters appear after the page is generated. Why can this be?

The textarea is put in a series of nested tables, and what I have found out through experiments is that for every new table I put it in 6 new whitespaces are added, odd right? Furthermore, I found that if I put a single character just outside the textarea (also nested within tables), then the whitespace is not there. Why? Is it some kind of bug? Solution?

I cannot recreate the error in a simple HTML document.

Thanks, Jacob.

jacob · November 10th, 2005, 06:53 PM

As an ugly work-around to the problem I found is this...

Code:

<textarea id="message" name="message" type="text" runat="server"></textarea>
<script language="javascript">    
    document.getElementById("message").innerText = "";
</script>

Well, it is not pretty, but it works. Still very interested in the reason and perhaps the correct solution.

Jacob.

mhkay · November 10th, 2005, 07:27 PM

Unwanted whitespace in your result document can come from three sources:

(a) there was whitespace in the source document which you copied to the result

(b) there was whitespace in the stylesheet which you copied to the result

(c) the whitespace was added by the serializer when indenting the result document if you specified indent=yes (which is the default for HTML)

Without more information it's impossible to tell which of these was the cause in your case.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

jacob · November 10th, 2005, 08:25 PM

Thanks again, Michael, and naturally you are right.

The 3rd whitespace source you mentioned (c) fit quite well on the description of the problem in the first place; i.e. as the tables get more and more nested, more whitespace is added.

I swiched the indent to no and there was no more whitespace in un-wanted places. Is it a bug?

Thanks, Jacob.