Re: [xsl] Initial whitespace in PI from XSLT, main body

Hey Syd and XSL-List,

"The client may not even notice that all of her PIs have lost a leading
space after her files are 'fixed' ..." indeed!

Maybe the solution here is to introduce a new house rule, namely whitespace
in PIs is never semantically significant, at least without further
specification of the PI or family of PIs, and hence is fair game for
reducing or rewriting.

From this point of view, normalization can be considered a feature not a
bug. The fact that the rule is not in the data model specs does not mean it
can't hang on your wall. It might be a good rule to have for other reasons
too. I am not proposing that everyone adopt it. (Maybe there are
counter use cases.) But it might be nice for you.

Cheers, Wendell

On Sun, May 8, 2022 at 3:59 AM Bauman, Syd 
s(_dot_)bauman(_at_)northeastern(_dot_)edu <
xsl-list-service(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com> wrote:

> Thanks for the thoughts, Dimitre. Could also use some other character
> (like ␠ (U+2420) or ␤ (U+2424)) and convert it later. But in fact I have no
> need to force a whitespace character on output. If I don’t mention it, the
> client may not even notice that all of her PIs have lost a leading space
> after her files are “fixed” with my XSLT. But the spaces are summarily
> unimportant. (Although it does make me wonder how they got there in the
> first place. :-)
>
> ------------------------------
> Syd, I see two ways (if you really need to) to maintain a PI whose string
> value starts with a whitespace character:
>
>   1. Enclose this value in some strippable non-whitespace characters (say
> apostrophes or quotes), or,
>
>   2. If the value is guaranteed not to end with a space character, just
> use the reversed string value, and when you get that in your code, reverse
> it back.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
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