How do I tell Cocoon to stop adding carriage-returns during XSL transformation?
The short answer is that this is not a Cocoon issue. You need to read up on XSLT usage. Please see other resources for XSLT, specifically, the XSL FAQ and discussion lists. The long answer is that you need to use the XSLT function normalize-space() whenever you want to rely on the content of an xml element.