Specifying the xml:space attribute with value "preserve" should inform the XML parser that the white-space-only child text elements are to be kept.

It seems that xsltproc does not honour that attribute.

Here's a simple example to illustrate the problem:

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

<xsl:template match="/" xml:space="preserve">
<document>
    <value>isn't this boring</value>
</document>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>



Expected output:

paul@sparkplug:~$ xsltproc simple.xsl test.xml 
<document>
    <value>isn't this boring</value>
</document>
paul@sparkplug:~$ 


Actual output:

paul@sparkplug:~$ xsltproc simple.xsl test.xml 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<document><value>isn't this boring</value></document>
paul@sparkplug:~$ 

Cheers,

Paul.