Symphony.

I have the following code in an html element:

<xsl:value-of select="/data/klant/entry/voornaam" /> <xsl:value-of select="/data/klant/entry/tussenvoegsel" /> <xsl:value-of select="/data/klant/entry/achternaam" />

However, the white space between is removed by XSLT. How can I prevent this? Note that sometimes the middle "value-of" returns an empty string, so I don't want to use  

Check out

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4522264/i-want-to-remove-xsl-whitespace-from-markdown-formatting and
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4521938/remove-whitespace-from-xsl

You could concatenate them together.

<xsl:value-of select="concat(voornaam, ' ', tussenvoegsel, ' ', achternaam)" />

Take @nick's advice, it's best.

But if you ever want to be sure your white spaces appear in any situation, output them with   or <xsl:text> </xsl:text>

Great, thanks a lot! I did find something about whitespace-preserve but couldn't get it working. The concat solution does work though and it makes my xsl statements shorter as well :)

@frankel: the problem with Nick's solution is that you will now get 2 whitespaces if there is no tussenvoegsel, which is quite common in dutch names.

I would recommend that you check if tussenvoegsel is set, and change the value-of accordingly:

<xsl:choose>
    <xsl:when test="tussenvoegsel=''"><xsl:value-of select="concat(voornaam, ' ', achternaam)" /></xsl:when>
    <xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="concat(voornaam, ' ', tussenvoegsel, ' ', achternaam)" /></xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

Although @remie is right, I wouldn't mind too much of it, since 2 (or more) spaces in your HTML code would always be rendered as one space. Unless you have the name in a <pre> or something...

I know... it's not strictly correct, but it keeps your XSL a bit tidier ;-)

Yep, I don't bother checking it because HTML won't care. But thanks for the suggestion :)

Or for purists it's cleaner and shorter to revert back from double spaces than using a conditional:

<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(concat(voornaam, ' ', tussenvoegsel, ' ', achternaam))" />

That's exactly why everyone hates XSLT. Making simple things so ridiculously ugly and complicated.