could a line break be lost during parsing?

[dongjiang tang <dt...@glassoc.com>]

Hi, 
I am generating a html page using XSLT.

I have a element with the value of mutiple line of text in a xml stream, like below:
"line one
line two
line three"
I print it out right before the parsing:
      System.out.println("XML = "+input.toString()) ;
      reader.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(input.toString()))) ;
I confirmed the element value is just like above with line break

But in the html, I  want to break it into mutiple line using the following templates but DID not see the line break:
<xsl:template name="add-line-breaks">
   <xsl:param name="string" select="." />
   <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="contains($string, '&#xA;')">
         <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($string, '&#xA;')" />
         <br />
         <xsl:call-template name="add-line-breaks">
            <xsl:with-param name="string"
                            select="substring-after($string, '&#xA;')" />
         </xsl:call-template>
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
         <xsl:value-of select="$string" />
      </xsl:otherwise>
   </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

then I added some debuging code in my xsl file to show the element directly:     <xsl:value-of select="@hdrL" /> (the @hdrL is the attribute holding that string value), then I went to the source after I re-generated the HTML page, I found that that element= "line one line two line three" without the line break

I feel somehow I lost the line break during the parsing. 
Am I right about this? if yes, is there any confirguration to avoid this? 

thank you !!

dongjiang