Automatically Inserting Non-Breaking Spaces Into Empty Table Cells

Many browsers suffer from the feature that they omit the table borders from empty cells which. You have different possibilities to solve this issue.

CSS property empty-cells:

table {
    empty-cells: show;
}

The default value is collapse, so empty cells are not shown. More info you can find in the CSS 2 spec.

Non-breaking space via XSLT:

The following XSLT snippet, a xsl:template match, activates on encountering a table cell and replaces empty cells and cells that contain only whitespace with a non-breaking space.

To use this code, simply copy the snippet into one of your XSLT stylesheets.

<xsl:template match="td">
    <td>
        <xsl:choose>
            <!-- If cell has child nodes or contains text then output them -->
            <xsl:when test="* or normalize-space()">
                <xsl:apply-templates/> 
            </xsl:when>
            <!-- Otherwise the cell is empty and we output a non-breaking space -->
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:text>&amp;#160;</xsl:text>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </td>
</xsl:template>

Notes

  • The expression in the test attribute is evaluated to a boolean value.
  • * is evaluated to true if a child element exists.
  • normalize-space() is evaluated to true if the function returns a string. All descendant text nodes of the context td element are concatenated, leading and trailing whitespace characters are removed. Multiple spaces, tabs and new line characters are replaced by a single space. More info in the XPath spec.
  • &#160; is the character reference for the non-breaking space.

– based on a solution provided by AlanHodgkinson.

Further comments

If &#160; is not the solution you prefer, but you want to use the &nbsp; known from HTML, you can add an entity to the XSLT stylesheet in front of the xsl:stylesheet root element:

<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [
<!ENTITY nbsp "&amp;#160;">
]>

More info in the XML spec.

– based on a solution provided by Anonymous author.

The originally posted solution by Alan Hodgkinson uses disable-output-escaping, but this is not recommended:

<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>

Why? Please read on this issue at XSLTDisableOutputEscaping.

Or use a comment

I believe that a comment is just as good as a space as far as Netscape is concerned. It's a bit bigger, but it has the advantage that it's not really "content", so it shouldn't affect formatting as much as a space, which a browser will be rendering in a particular font, hence it will have some "size".

e.g. use this template in conjunction with an identity transformation:

<xsl:template match="td[not(normalize-space())]">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
        <xsl:comment>NS hack</xsl:comment>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

– Con.

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