Whitespace is removed when exporting table data as XML Format

[Valektrum]

I'm trying to export my table data with the XML Format. However, I noticed that some of my text fields are losing some whitespace characters.

For example, the string " system normal " will be exported as "system normal".

It seems to be working fine with the Tab Delimited format, but I would prefer to use the XML Format.
My sanitize level is set to "None (Off)".
I'm using v4.0.15-beta with Access 2016.

[joyfullservice]

Thanks for reporting this! Are you referring to data within a field? Would you be able to provide a screenshot or example?

[Valektrum]

In Access, my data for this column is " -   System  Normal   -". The extra whitespace is important.

After exporting with the mentioned settings, this is what I get in the XML:
- System Normal -

Every whitespace is now a single space instead of multiple spaces. The whitespace is also removed at the beginning of the string.

[joyfullservice]

Thanks, that is helpful!

[joyfullservice]

I have reproduced this issue in the testing database. The change is coming from the FormatXML function, and probably related to the XSLT function normalize-space(). I am not real familiar with XSLT, but I am checking to see if this could be an easy fix, or if it might have other unintended effects...

[Valektrum]

Thank you for looking into this. This project is great!

[joyfullservice]

Well, even with the help of ChatGPT, I was unable to fully figure out how to adjust the transformation while leaving the content intact. When I removed the template section with the normalize-space(.) function, it seems to have resolved the problem for table data export, but I don't know if that is going to cause other unintended effects. (I noticed that line breaks in the original XML may cause additional blank lines in the resulting XML.) Perhaps @bclothier could shed some light on this...

I will go ahead and push this change to the dev branch. You can build the add-in from source and test it out on your project. I left the original XSLT lines commented out in case we need to revert this change. Hope that helps!

[joyfullservice]

For reference, here is the original XSLT:

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

  <xsl:template match="@*">
    <xsl:copy/>
  </xsl:template>

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

  <xsl:template match="*">
    <xsl:param name="indent" select="''"/>
    <xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="$indent"/>
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|*|text()">
        <xsl:with-param name="indent" select="concat($indent, '  ')"/>
      </xsl:apply-templates>
    </xsl:copy>
    <xsl:if test="count(../*) &gt; 0 and ../*[last()] = . and not(following-sibling::*)">
      <xsl:text>&#xA;</xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="substring($indent, 3)"/>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I removed the following:

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

[bclothier]

The issue is that the XSLT transformation does manual indentation rather than letting the parser do the indentation which would be too wide. In order to do the indenting, it has to add the indentation which is achieved by treating XML as if it were text and then indenting it.

The problem is that we necessarily don't want to strip spaces from the values but we do want to strip the spaces from the tags (e.g. the XML structure itself). Will have to see if we can find a way to make the distinction.