XML space tag problem in XML simple transformation de-serialization

Dear friends,

I have a problem while converting xml file into internal table (de-serialization) using simple transformation.

there is a tag like <tag> </tag> and I am using condition to check whether tag consist data or not.

because of the space value in the tag I am getting an exception 'CX_ST_COND_CHECK_FAIL' during the condition check.

before deserialization, i am removing empty tags from the xml by using below statement.

REPLACE ALL OCCURRENCES OF REGEX '<\w+/>' IN l_string WITH ''.

but because the tag has the space value it is not getting removed from the XML.

and i am using below code to check is there any tag with empty value. at this condition, because of space value

i am getting the exception  'CX_ST_COND_CHECK_FAIL'.

              <tt:cond check="DENIAL_CODE!=''">

                <DenialCode tt:value-ref="DENIAL_CODE"/>

              </tt:cond>

please advise on this.

Regards,

Rajesh