XMLStarlet command line XML toolkit / Feature Requests / #36 preserve original formatting/spaces between attributes

#36 preserve original formatting/spaces between attributes

Milestone: default

Status: closed-wont-fix

Owner: nobody

Labels: None

Priority: 4

Updated: 2014-08-09

Created: 2009-09-14

Creator: Alain Knaff

Private: No

The options --pf (preserve original formatting) and --ps (preserve non-significant spaces) only work partially.

Any tag which has line breaks between attributes is collapsed on a single line.

See example before and after.

xmlstarlet ed --pf --ps -u "/server/mbean/@code" -v org.mobicents.servlet.sip.startup.jboss.JBossSip before.xml >after.xml

Discussion

Alain Knaff - 2009-09-14

Before

before.xml

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Alain Knaff - 2009-09-14

After

after.xml

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Noam Postavsky - 2010-11-26

priority: 5 --> 4

status: open --> open-accepted
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Noam Postavsky - 2010-11-26

The example doesn't seem to apply but I can confirm the bug:

$ cat ws.xml
<doc
a="foo"/>
$ xml ed --ps --pf ws.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<doc a="foo"/>

Fixing this will be tricky, I haven't quite figured out how whitespace is handled but patching libxml2 will likely be required.

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Noam Postavsky - 2011-01-15

So currently --pf and --ps are indentical and don't work entirely as advertised: they preserve whitespace nodes in the tree, which means whitespace inside a tag is lost. I'm currently leaning towards just changing the documentation to reflect this rather than trying to fix it.

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Noam Postavsky - 2011-03-11

I've changed the --help message to describe the actual behaviour in commit dee21ea7e1357835fc90394e604a946a168be079.

I'm moving this to feature requests.

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Noam Postavsky - 2011-03-11

labels: 475157 -->

summary: preserve original formatting/spaces don't work --> preserve original formatting/spaces between attributes

status: open-accepted --> open
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Noam Postavsky - 2014-08-09

I don't think there is a realistic prospect of ever implementing this, short of completely rewriting xmlstarlet.

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Noam Postavsky - 2014-08-09

status: open --> closed-wont-fix

Group: --> default
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