Remove all single characters from string using xslt1.0 - xslt-1.0

Question

<title>
<article_title>Land a b c d Band</article_title>
</title>
using the following function
replace(article_title, '(^[^ ]+)(.+\s+)([^ ]+)$', '$1 $3')
this string in is transformed to Land Band which is exactly what i want.
but the problem is i need this solution in xslt 1.0 since the java app that i am working with can only handle xslt 1.0 parsing.

Answer 1

This XSLT 1.0 transformation (there is a nasty SO bug and the code isn't indented -- I apologize for this visual mess...):
<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="text()" name="removeSingles">
<xsl:param name="pText" select="."/>
<xsl:variable name="vText" select="normalize-space($pText)"/>
<xsl:if test="string-length($vText)">
<xsl:variable name="vLeftChars" select=
"substring-before(concat($vText, ' '), ' ')"/>
<xsl:if test="string-length($vLeftChars) >1">
<xsl:value-of select="$vLeftChars"/>
<xsl:if test=
"not(string-length($vLeftChars)
>=
string-length($vText)
)
">
<xsl:text> </xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:if>
<xsl:call-template name="removeSingles">
<xsl:with-param name="pText" select=
"substring-after($vText, ' ')"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when applied on the provided XML document:
<title>
<article_title>Land a b c d Band</article_title>
</title>
produces the wanted, correct result:
<title>
<article_title>Land Band</article_title>
</title>