Removing all blanks from a string

[alk]

Hi there,

maybe I'm thinking much to complicated, but all I want to do is to remove all blanks from a string and assign the result to variable. In an act of desperation I created the following function:

Code: Select all

	<xsl:function name="str:strip-blanks" as="xs:string">

		<xsl:param name="myparam"  as="xs:string"/>

			<xsl:analyze-string  regex="\S+" select="$myparam">

				<xsl:matching-substring>

					<xsl:value-of select="."/>

				</xsl:matching-substring>

			</xsl:analyze-string>		

	</xsl:function>	

But when running my script I receive the message 'A sequence of more than one item is not allowed as result of function str:strip-blanks()'.

Any ideas on this or is there a much simpler solution???

Best regards
- alex

[george]

Hi Alex,

In general this can be performed with a string normalization to have all kind of whitespace characters converted to space followed by a translate of space to nothing:

Code: Select all

translate(normalize-space($myParam), ' ', '')

Note that the above works also in XSLT 1.0.

Best Regards,
George

[alk]

Hi George,

what can I say? Hail to the king! Thanks a lot for this damned fast answer... and it works... as always!

Just one thing. Do you have any idea what's causing my error message? Pure curiosity...

Best Regards
- alex

[george]

Hi Alex,

If you have more than one match then the xsl:matching-string will be activated more than once and the value-of will generate more than one item. Now you declared the expected result of the funtion to be one string value thus the error. If you change that to string* for instance then you will not have this error anymore but the result will be a sequence of strings rather than a string. Alternatively you can get the sequence inside the function in a variable and then concat the sequence items for return:

Code: Select all

<xsl:function name="str:strip-blanks" as="xs:string">

    <xsl:param name="myparam"  as="xs:string"/>

    <xsl:variable name="content">

      <xsl:analyze-string  regex="\S+" select="$myparam">

        <xsl:matching-substring>

          <xsl:value-of select="."/>

        </xsl:matching-substring>

      </xsl:analyze-string>  

    </xsl:variable>    

    <xsl:value-of select="concat($content, '')"/>

  </xsl:function>   

Best Regards,
George