Re: Removing whitespace from end of text file

Sheila Thomson <discuss@bluegumtree.com> writes:
> The answer to this question is probably in the (many) various specs relating to this question but I've not managed to find it, so apologies in advance.

I’m perplexed. 

I tried your example and I reproduced it. That’s odd, I thought, and I went off to the fn:replace description, eventually found my way to the “s” flag, added the “s” flag and it did the right thing.

Problem solved, I thought.

Then I read:

> But it only removes the final space, not the tabs or newlines (I'm testing with both Morgana and Calabash).

And I thought, “hang on, ‘s’ shouldn’t have effected tabs.” And I went back and re-read the section on the “s” flag and thought “hang on, ‘s’ shouldn’t have effected ‘\s’, either.”

So I took the “s” flag out and…now I can’t reproduce the problem.

Your step, exactly as written, seems to work just fine as I’d expect it to now that I’ve read my way through the docs.

I’ve saved your example document in textfile.txt:

$ od -a textfile.txt
0000000    P   r   i   n   c   e  nl  ht  ht  ht  ht  ht   P   u   r   p
0000020    l   e  sp   R   a   i   n  sp   (   M   u   l   t   i   p   l
0000040    e   x   )  sp   M   H   0   1   3   6   5  nl  ht  ht  sp  nl
0000060   nl  ht  ht  sp
0000064

This pipeline:

<p:declare-step xmlns:p="http://www.w3.org/ns/xproc"
                name="main" version="3.1">
  <p:output port="result"/>

  <p:text-replace>
    <p:with-input>
      <p:document href="textfile.txt"/>
    </p:with-input>
    <p:with-option name="pattern" select="'\s+$'" />
    <p:with-option name="replacement" select="''" />
  </p:text-replace>

  <p:wrap-sequence wrapper="wrap"/>

</p:declare-step>

produces 

<wrap>Prince
                                        Purple Rain (Multiplex) MH01365</wrap>

That’s true for both XML Calabash and Morgana (1.6.8, I haven’t updated recently).

I’m a bit, as I said, perplexed. I genuinely don’t think I imagined that I reproduced the problem initially, but I don’t have a better explanation.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/

> A polar bear is just another way of expressing a rectangular bear.

Received on Saturday, 4 October 2025 08:25:41 UTC