CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xmlxsltxpathxslt-1.0
Simon
Simon

Reputation: 14472

Can XSLT or XPath handle an empty file?

I have an file which will either be empty, or will contain a single line with a single string value.

I can consume the file contents in either an XPath expression evaluator or in an XSL transform, version 1.

I simply need to know if there is a value in the file or not.

As far as I know, both tools require correctly formed XML.

Do I have any options?

(It's a boring story about why I only have XPath or XSLT 1.0 available to me)

Upvotes: 2

Views: 162

Answers (1)

kjhughes
kjhughes

Reputation: 111706

You're right that XPath and XSLT generally operate on well-formed XML, and an empty file is not well formed XML because it lacks a single root element.

XSLT 2.0, however, can read non-XML via unparsed-text(). That's your ticket for exploring empty or any other text that's not well-formed XML using XSLT.

If you only have XSLT 1.0, then you're out of luck if you can't operate outside of XSLT 1.0 via preprocessing or using non-standard extensions.

Upvotes: 1

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