Re: Whitespace in XML content

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for writing.  A couple things:

1) A patch will definitely help folks evaluate what you are talking about 
and make it easier for committers to get your changes into CVS.

2) What is Tidy doing for you if you don't want to pretty print?  WF-ness?

3) Leaving that aside, there are a couple things you can do to preserve 
whitespace.

Try setting "--wrap 99999".  This should prevent the line wrapping, which 
is probably the single biggest whitespace change Tidy will do.

Of course, be sure to set --input-xml yes and --output-xml yes.

Be sure to _not_ turn on all the "cleanup" options (off by default):
         --clean
         --bare
         --logical-emphasis
         etc.

Here comes the difficult one:  --indent.  The options are yes, no and 
auto.  Although it will strip away leading whitespace, you may want to use 
"no".  "yes" will indent much more often than you probably want (and in no 
particular relation to your input).  "auto" may be OK, but be sure to set 
--indent-spaces to something you like.  The amount of whitespace will 
change, but it should be in roughly the same places.  There is no 
"preserve" option, which is what I would recommend (vs. a new option).

Finally, you probably also want --vertical-space no.  Here you have yes and 
no, where "yes" means Tidy Classic layout and "no" gives you fewer empty 
lines.  Again, there is no "preserve" option.

hth,
Charlie



At 02:29 PM 1/24/2005 -0800, Sarah Wilkin wrote:
>I recently filed
>http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
>func=detail&aid=1104229&group_id=27659&atid=390963, which has no
>additional comments yet.
>
>I'm curious what the procedure is for adding new flags to the tidy
>options. For example, I'm interested in a "xml preserve whitespace" or
>a general "preserve whitespace" flag (where the developer would strip
>unwanted whitespace afterwards while walking the tree). Is there
>procedure for nominating header changes, or should I go ahead and make
>the change and hope it gets picked up? The option to treat elements
>with a particular name as block elements doesn't help as I don't know
>what the root element is ahead of time.
>
>Of course the best change would be to evaluate whitespace in xml
>differently than it is in html, purging only the whitespace used as
>spacing between element tags. Since tidy has such a strong html focus
>this would require a much bigger change in the source then merely
>preserving all whitespace.
>
>Thanks,
>--Sarah
>
>
>
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