How to strip whitespace-only text nodes from a DOM before serialization?
You can find empty text nodes using XPath, then remove them programmatically like so:
XPathFactory xpathFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
// XPath to find empty text nodes.
XPathExpression xpathExp = xpathFactory.newXPath().compile(
"//text()[normalize-space(.) = '']");
NodeList emptyTextNodes = (NodeList)
xpathExp.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
// Remove each empty text node from document.
for (int i = 0; i < emptyTextNodes.getLength(); i++) {
Node emptyTextNode = emptyTextNodes.item(i);
emptyTextNode.getParentNode().removeChild(emptyTextNode);
}
This approach might be useful if you want more control over node removal than is easily achieved with an XSL template.
Try using the following XSL and the strip-space
element to serialize your DOM:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
http://helpdesk.objects.com.au/java/how-do-i-remove-whitespace-from-an-xml-document