XML input is processed by the XML parser before it gets anywhere near the
XSLT processor. The only way to prevent XML's normalization of whitespace
characters (whether in element or attribute content) is to write the
characters as character references, e.g. 
 You can of course do that by
preprocessing the file in some non-XML-aware tool before submitting it to
the XML parser.

Are you really sure you need to do this? Somehow, you're not using XML the
way it was intended to be used and that's always bad news. I've forgotten
what your original problem was, if you ever explained it.

Michael Kay

Grtz,
Geert