Can XSLT or XPath handle an empty file?

Question

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)

kjhughes · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-06 19:41:36Z

1

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.

edited Jan 6, 2016 at 19:41

answered Jan 6, 2016 at 19:16

kjhughes

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2 Comments

Simon Over a year ago

Thanks for your answer. Sadly, I am working within an existing framework and XSLT 1 is my only option :(

kjhughes Over a year ago

Then as you anticipated, you're out of luck. Sorry. Answer updated to make that more clear.

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