Cfrgtkky

All,

I have been using the extremely basic stylesheet at the very bottom of this post to remove empty element nodes from XML records. The XSLT does the job adequately, but the XML records actually include literal "null" values in some elements that the stylesheet doesn't remove. Example:

<marc:datafield tag="400" ind1="1" ind2=" ">

   <marc:subfield code="a">null</marc:subfield>

   <marc:subfield code="q">null</marc:subfield>

   <marc:subfield code="d"></marc:subfield>

</marc:datafield>

I've been removing these "nulls" manually with a find and replace prior to running the XSLT, a procedure that works well enough--but it would be more sensible to have the XSLT itself remove these values as well as any empty nodes. In other words, I'd like to strip out nodes that contain "null"

<marc:subfield code="q">null</marc:subfield>

AND nodes like

<marc:subfield code="q"></marc:subfield>

so that the entire block of nodes represented in the top example in this message disappears entirely.

The XSLT immediately below succeeds in removing nodes with the literal "null" value, but it leaves the empty nodes in place. I need the XSLT to do both things simultaneously: remove literal "null" values and the nodes that contain them as well as the empty nodes. I've tried doing a "choose-otherwise" condition but it doesn't work.

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

<xsl:template match="*[not(node())]"/>    

<xsl:template match="node()|@*">

    <xsl:if test="(. != '') and (. != 'null')">

    <xsl:copy>

        <xsl:apply-templates select="node()[normalize-space()]|@*"/>

    </xsl:copy>

    </xsl:if>    

</xsl:template>

Any assistance you might be able to offer would be hugely, immensely appreciated.

Regards, and many thanks--

Sed V.

ORIGINAL XSLT:

<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" media-type="text/xml"/>

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

<xsl:template match="*[not(node())]"/>    

<xsl:template match="node()|@*">

    <xsl:copy>

        <xsl:apply-templates select="node()[normalize-space()]|@*"/>

    </xsl:copy>

</xsl:template>

You're almost there. Your template

<xsl:template match="*[not(node())]"/>

filters empty elements - just add or text() = 'null' to the predicate to filter elements that wrap literal null strings.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>



    <!-- Identity transform -->

    <xsl:template match="@*|node()">

        <xsl:copy>

            <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>

        </xsl:copy>

    </xsl:template>



    <!-- Filter empty elements or elements that contain the text 'null' -->

    <xsl:template match="*[not(node()) or text() = 'null']"/>

</xsl:stylesheet>