White Space

[Simon St.Laurent]

At 04:42 PM 8/11/99 -0400, jadams at touchpointsw.com wrote:
>Am using IBM xml4c2_2_0 SAXPrint, and
>It appears that leading and trailing spaces (whitespace) surrounding an
>element, e.g.
>     <name>mumble</name> ,
>     <name>mumble </name>,
>     and lastly
>     <name>mumble
>     </name>,
>offer up via the characters handler mumble with no space, a trailing space,
>and lastly a trailing NL (0x0A) respectively.
>My difficulty lies in comparing the many forms of mumble with the string
>"mumble" because of the white space.  Simon's "Building ..." Pp 87 suggests
>that maybe (hopefully) the parser is removing white space.
>Should the underlying SAX parser be removing the troublesome white space or
>should i be removing this problem white space in the characters handler???
>Thanks much

It's that wacky distinction between what the parser does (which is most of
what the XML spec discusses) and what the application does (which is
xml:space).  The _parser_ should return all whitespace to the application,
apart from the rules about end of line in section 2.11.  That means you'll
need to have your application, or a filter (as David Megginson suggested)
eliminate whitespace you don't consider significant.

Whitespace seems to be an issue that just never dies...

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer (2nd Ed - September)
Building XML Applications
Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical
Sharing Bandwidth / Cookies
http://www.simonstl.com

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