toprettyxml messes up with whitespaces

[Paul Boddie]

On 3 Okt, 11:30, "Jorgen Bodde" <jorgen.maill... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you for confirming this, I did manage a work around. When
> reading back the XML file, I strip it off it's whitespaces before I
> parse it. Then when writing it back no excessive whitespaces are
> appended. My best guess is that toprettyxml is not intelligently
> handling whitespaces that are already there, and bluntly appends more
> whitespaces to it, making it grow exponentially.

This seems like a reasonable explanation without having looked at the
source code myself.

[...]

> And then I simply use parseString instead of parse. But honestly, I
> think it is a bug, because the XML standard also says that whitespaces
> before normal text should be ignored, and I do not see it back as text
> when I read the node, so why preserve it and mess up the formatting in
> the end?

Which part of the standard is this? Here's the XML 1.0 specification's
section on whitespace:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-20060816/#sec-white-space

It seems to me that applications (and the libraries which serve them)
can choose what to do unless xml:space is set to "preserve". It does
seem odd that the toprettyxml method chooses to respect existing
whitespace whilst also disrupting it by adding more, however.

Paul