[jdom-interest] setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace inoperant ?

Bradley S. Huffman hip at a.cs.okstate.edu
Thu Dec 9 09:59:24 PST 2004


Ken Roberts writes:

> On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 06:38, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> 
> > setIgnoringAllWhitespace()  is the wrong name for this functionality. Do 
> > you really want to throw away all white space? 
> > Eveninrecordlikedocumentsthiscouldbeveryhardtoread. I think what you 
> > really want to do is throw away all text nodes that consist of white 
> > space exclusively, but retain all white space in text nodes that contain 
> >   any non-whitespace characters. The correct name for this method would 
> > be setIgnoringBoundaryWhitespace(). The functionality proposed is fine. 
> > I just want to make sure we get the name right.
> 
> 
> What something like this should do is convert an infinite amount of
> whitespace in a single instance into a single space.  Not sure about
> "middle" text, but an equivalent of String.trim() would probably be OK
> anywhere if you choose this option. Keep in mind that it's an OPTION
> rather than a change in default behavior.

You have to be careful when trimming whitespace or something like

    <p>This is a 
              <i>   test</i>
       sentence.   </p>

could end up as

    <p>This is a<i>test</i>sentence.</p>

which may or may not be what is really desired.

Brad


More information about the jdom-interest mailing list