How to find all empty subtrees in XPath

Question

The overall goal is to remove all empty nodes--including nodes which would be made empty if the child empty nodes were removed. The following:

<xsl:template match="*[not(node())]"/>

will remove empty nodes, but will leave empty nodes that had only empty nodes in them previously. I think I need an xpath that will match all nodes that all descendants of which have no attributes and no text nodes (ignoring whitespace).

Answer 1

I think I found the answer...

<xsl:template match="*[not(.//text() | .//@*)]"/>

Just find all nodes that have no descendant text or attributes, right? Is there something I'm missing such that this won't do what I think it will in some cases? In my simple test, this seemed to work.

Answer 2

Use:

<xsl:template match="*[not(.//@*) and not(descendent::text())]"/>

Notice the and operator. Using or does not solve the problem.