Removing empty tags from XML via XSLT

Question

I had an xml of the following pattern

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <Person>
      <FirstName>Ahmed</FirstName>
      <MiddleName/>
      <LastName>Aboulnaga</LastName>
      <CompanyInfo>
        <CompanyName>IPN Web</CompanyName>
        <Title/>
    <Role></Role>
        <Department>
    </Department>
      </CompanyInfo>
    </Person>

I used the following xslt (got from forums) in my attempt to remove empty tags

 <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
<xsl:if test=". != '' or ./@* != ''">
  <xsl:copy>
  <xsl:copy-of select = "@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates />
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:if>

The xslt used is successful in removing tags like

<Title/>
    <Role></Role>

...but fails when empty tags are on two lines, eg:

<Department>
    </Department>

Is there any fix for this?

Answer 1

This transformation doesn't need any conditional XSLT instructions at all and uses no explicit priorities:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
 xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
     </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match=
    "*[not(@*|*|comment()|processing-instruction()) 
     and normalize-space()=''
      ]"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When applied on the provided XML document:

<Person>
    <FirstName>Ahmed</FirstName>
    <MiddleName/>
    <LastName>Aboulnaga</LastName>
    <CompanyInfo>
        <CompanyName>IPN Web</CompanyName>
        <Title/>
        <Role></Role>
        <Department>
        </Department>
    </CompanyInfo>
</Person>

it produces the wanted, correct result:

<Person>
   <FirstName>Ahmed</FirstName>
   <LastName>Aboulnaga</LastName>
   <CompanyInfo>
      <CompanyName>IPN Web</CompanyName>
   </CompanyInfo>
</Person>