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<h1>Whitespace Stripping in Source Documents</h1>
<p>A number of factors combine to determine whether whitespace-only text nodes in the source document
are visible to the user-written XSLT or XQuery code.</p>
<p>By default, if there is a DTD or schema, then <i>ignorable whitespace</i> is stripped from any source
document loaded from a <code>StreamSource</code> or <code>SAXSource</code>. Ignorable whitespace is defined
as the whitespace that appears separating the child elements in element declared to have element-only content.
This whitespace is removed regardless of any <code>xml:space</code> attributes in the source document.</p>
<p>It is possible to change this default behavior in several ways.</p>
<ul>
<li content="para">
<p>From the Transform or Query command line, options are available: <code>-strip:all</code> strips all whitespace text nodes,
<code>-strip:none</code> strips no whitespace text nodes, and <code>-strip:ignorable</code> strips ignorable whitespace text nodes only
(this is the default).</p>
</li>
<li content="para">
<p>If the <code>-p</code> option is used on the command line, then query parameters are recognized in the URI passed to
the <code>document()</code> or <code>doc()</code> function. The parameter <code>strip-space=yes</code> strips
all whitespace text nodes, <code>strip-space=no</code> strips
no whitespace text nodes, and <code>strip-space=ignorable</code> strips
ignorable whitespace text nodes only. This overrides anything specified on the command line.</p>
</li>
<li content="para">
<p>Options corresponding to the above can also be set on the <code>TransformerFactory</code> object or on the
<a class="bodylink" href="../javadoc/net/sf/saxon/Configuration.html"><code>Configuration</code></a>. These settings are global.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Whitespace stripping that is specified in any of the above ways does not occur only if the source document is
parsed under Saxon's control: that is, if it supplied as a JAXP <code>StreamSource</code> or <code>SAXSource</code>. It also applies where
the input is supplied in the form of a tree (for example, a DOM). In this case Saxon wraps the supplied tree in a virtual tree that provides a view of
the original tree with whitespace text nodes omitted.</p>
<p>This whitespace stripping is additional (and prior) to any stripping carried out as a result of the
<code>xsl:strip-space</code> declaration in the stylesheet.</p>
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