Symphony.

I'm having a problem filtering empty textareas in XSLT having changed the configuration of an existing web site with existing entries.

Former entries without text in a textarea field I have, seem to have NULL for both value and value_formatted in the database and when I attempt to filter with a simple for-each statement in xslt all goes well.

My textarea is named "description"

My for-each statement is in the form of

<xsl:for-each select="entry/location-entries/item[description = '']">

However, if I save a new entry or edit and existing one but leave the description field empty the corresponding line in the database still has NULL for value field but the value-formatted field becomes empty(that is nothing in it), and my for-each statement fails to catch that item.

So it appears that description = '' relates only to value-formatted = NULL. How can I catch these completely empty fields with my for-each?

A solution or advice would be much appreciated, is there another way to say empty?

I'm using Symphony 2.3 BTW.

Erm, forgot to say, this is a SSM of "location-entries" included in an entry. Not sure if that's relevant.

Try:

<xsl:for-each select="entry/location-entries/item[normalize-space(description) = '']">

That should select items without description and with description like:

• <description></description>
• <description/>
• <description><p></p></description>

Big thanks ahwayakchih that works fine.

I'm confused as to why though, I'll go look up "normalize-space" and find out.

Thanks again :)

So, I think this works because where the content of my database value-formatted field appeared to be empty, its content wasn't actually an empty string it was just a generic nothing.

My attempt to

...item[description = '']...

Was trying to match the field contents with an empty string which failed.

...item[normalize-space(description) = '']...

As well as stripping white-space also converts the node contents to a string and so it could be matched with my empty string selector.

It seems good to use normalise-space as it will also deal with other cases as ahwayakchih shows above, rather than just my case which is to do with string type content.