Trailing blanks for 'text' output

Neal · May 29th, 2008, 03:56 AM

Hi,

I need to output a XML file into 'text' layout using fixed length output fields. Whilst debugging in XMLSpy the trailing blanks are visible and the fields are correct widths, but if I select Transform within the application, the trailing blanks are reformated.

After surfing the net for a while, I found that a common solution appears to be the include 'indent' in the following statements:

Code:

<xsl:output method="text" indent="yes"/>

OR..

Code:

<xsl:output method="text" indent="no"/>

I've tried several variations on this statement including the 'omit-xml-declaration' and 'media-type="text/plain"' but the .html output always ignores my trailing blanks.

(I'm using xml version="1.0")

Can anyone advise please?

Thanks in advance.

Neal

A Northern Soul

mhkay · May 29th, 2008, 05:02 AM

The attributes indent, omit-xml-declaration, and media-type have no effect when using method="text".

If your stylesheet outputs spaces into the result tree, then they should appear in the serialized output. Of course, there are many text editors that will strip trailing whitespace before a newline, so it's quite possible that your output is being corrupted by a post-transformation process.

Where does ".html" fit into this?

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

Neal · May 29th, 2008, 05:29 AM

'.html' is the extention I was using for the output file at the time. But the results are the same if I use the '.txt' extention (See 'Tools'/'Options'/'XSL' Tab in XMLSpy).

Neal

A Northern Soul

mhkay · May 29th, 2008, 06:05 AM

>but if I select Transform within the application, the trailing blanks are reformated.

I don't know which application you are referring to here. Your own? If it works in XML Spy and not in environment X, then we need to know more about environment X.

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

Neal · May 29th, 2008, 06:17 AM

Transform is a function within XMLSpy (XSL Transform).

Believe me, I would have mentioned an additional application name if there was one.

As I mentioned in the first post, the trailing blanks are visible when debugging in XMLSpy. However, when selecting the 'Transform' function, the trailing blanks are reformatted.

Neal

A Northern Soul

mhkay · May 29th, 2008, 06:25 AM

Then it sounds like a question for Altova.

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