Re: [xml] Blank nodes problem

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 05:45:51PM -0500, Ed Day wrote:
> I am working on a DOM application in which I would like to suppress the generation of blank nodes to make 
> the tree easier to work with.  To do this, I call xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) which seems to work pretty well.  
> However, I have recently run across a situation in which I have found that if a line in an XML file does 
> not end with a newline character immediately after the closing '>' character, a blank node is inserted into 
> the DOM tree.  In other words, some extra whitespace is present before the newline. 
>
> For example (using \n to represent newline), this is OK (no blank nodes):
>
> <a>\n
>    <b>
>
> this causes a blank node:
>
> <a>  \n
>    <b>
>
> Is this the way it is supposed to work (i.e. is this considered 'significant' whitespace) or is this a bug?

  All data whitespace are significant. Only the application really knows 
what can be discarded. The xmlKeepBlanksDefault() is a trick, a leftover
from legacy APIs, it's bad in a number of ways including the fact that
it uses a global variable for changing the library behaviour.
  I don't think it can be considered a bug, the behaviour can't really
be rationalized (people have tried historically and failed), with or
without xmlKeepBlanksDefault(0) some processing and checking is expected
at your level.

Daniel

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