On 1/25/06, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >   Is the expected behaviour that the whitespace text nodes
> > are stripped
> > out in a document node constructed in a variable?
>
> No, but it is expected that whitespace text nodes are removed from the
> stylesheet while it is being compiled. If you want to generate whitespace
> text nodes, use xsl:text or xsl:value-of.

Or of course you can use xml:space preserve eg:

<xsl:variable name="var" xml:space="preserve">
   <elem/>
</xsl:variable>

Here $var will contain 3 nodes with the whitespace nodes preserved,
instead of the default 1.

cheers
andrew