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In my situation I have a automated XSLT (1.0) running, transforming files to a SOAP format and pushing them over a WSDL. However, because the source is unreliable for good input data sometimes the XML files I have to pick up and process are blank. Is there a way to inject these files a value during transformation and output or ignore these blank files?

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  • What exactly do you mean by "blank"? Do you mean a file with literally zero content (zero bytes), or do you mean a file that has XML elements, but none of them are populated? If the former, I don't think any pure XSL engine will accept empty files -- Saxon, for instance, spits out a Premature end of file error if the input file is completely empty. If the input file has content that isn't valid, well-formed XML, Saxon spits out different errors. How are you processing the files? Commented May 2, 2017 at 23:44
  • If a file is "blank" then it isn't an XML file. Commented May 3, 2017 at 7:51

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No, the input to an XSLT 1.0 transformation must be a well-formed XML document, and to be well-formed, an XML document must be have single root element. Therefore, your transformation cannot take a blank (empty) document as input.

Fix the broken source of the empty "XML" documents, or pre-process the file before it hits the XSLT transformation.

See also How to read plain text content with XSLT 1.0 for some additional alternatives.

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Thanks everyone, this is what I feared but I couldn't find a solid answer anywhere.

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