How to remove spaces from the end of text in an el

Question

Does anyone know what XSL code would remove the trailing whitespace after the last word in an element?

<p>This is my paragraph.  </p>

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Look at the normalize-space() XPath function.

<xsl:template match="p">
  <p><xsl:value-of select="normalize-space()" /></p>
</xsl:template>

Be careful, there is a catch (which might or might not be relevant to you):

The [...] function returns the argument string with whitespace normalized by stripping leading and trailing whitespace and replacing sequences of whitespace characters by a single space.

This means it also removes all line breaks and tabs and other whitespace and turns them into a single space.

Answer 2

EDIT: Significant simplification of the code, thanks to a hint from Tomalak.

Here is an XPath 2.0 / XSLT 2.0 solution, which removes only the trailing spaces:

<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
 >
  <xsl:output method="text"/>

  <xsl:template match="text()">
    "<xsl:sequence select="replace(., '\s+$', '', 'm')"/>"
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When this is applied on the following XML document:

<someText>   This is    some text       </someText>

the wanted result is produced:

"   This is    some text"

You can see the XSLT 1.0 solution (implementing almost the same idea), which uses FXSL 1.x, here:

http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200112/msg01067.html