As you have discovered, the nodes are not in the document, to distinguish between NULL and empty string.

As for XSLT, you could always do:

<xsl:template match="row">
 <xsl:value-of select="column1"/>,<xsl:value-of select="column2"/>,<!-
+- etc etc -->
</xsl:template>
[download]

In this way, non-existant elements will get stringified into the empty string.

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile

Most of my code is tested...

Perl is strongly typed, it just has very few types (Dan)