If you are in a context where it makes sense to do
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/> <!-- or whatever instead of * -->
then

empty(.//text())

is enough

David



On 2 October 2016 at 13:15, Eliot Kimber ekimber@xxxxxxxxxxxx
<xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've inherited some code that has this type of check to determine if an
> element with arbitrary possible subelements has completely empty text
> content:
>
> normalize-space(string-join($context//text(), '')) != ''
>
> In XSLT 2 I'm pretty sure there's a simpler and/or more efficient way to
> do this.
>
>
> Is there a better way to do this and if so, what is it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eliot
> --
> Eliot Kimber
> http://contrext.com