Hello Michael,
Thanks for the response. After more investigation, I found that the
desired text was indeed being stored with the DOM Text element, but that
the serializer was truncating its value. After quite a bit of searching
on the web, I found that setting the 'xml:space=preserve' attribute on
the parent node resulted in the output being generated in the
pretty-print format desired but that spaces are preserved during this
writer output operation.
For those others who may be having a similar issue and are interested,
here is the xml that allowed the serializer to correctly preserve the
spaces:
<test>
<first>abc</first>
<second xml:space="preserve"> </second>
<third>def</third>
</test>
Without the 'xml:space=preserve' attribute, the following serialized XML
is generated from the serializer:
<test>
<first>abc</first>
<second />
<third>def</third>
</test>
I found the serializer could be told to preserve spaces, but then the
output was not generated in pretty-print format, which was desired.
Perhaps it is common knowledge about the xml:space attribute, but not to
me and was really the answer I was looking for because I didn't want to
alter the actual text data to contain a non-whitespace character to
accommodate the serializer which would have repercussions because on the
flip-side the parser then would need to be modified to perform the
necessary stripping of the content data.
Regards,
Nicholas
From: Michael Glavassevich [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 8:59 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: whitespace management with DOM element
Hi Nicholas,
I'm not sure I follow the issue you're having. Can you give a concrete
example?
Thanks.
Michael Glavassevich
XML Parser Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
<[email protected]> wrote on 12/14/2009 01:02:22 PM:
> Hello,
>
> I have an element that usually contains alpha characters, but
> depending upon the user input can contain a single space. I'm using
> the DocumentBuilderFactory to create an instance of DocumentBuilder,
> and then generating DOM elements from that and serializing the
> output to a file.
>
> I'm seeing the resulting serialized file is simply an empty XML
> element. Is it possible to configure the DOM builder to preserve
> the spaces if they exist, or does this go against the XML spec? If
> so, can you help me understand how to make that happen?
>
> Thanks,
> Nicholas
