Preserving the structure of the input XML file

[Oleg Dulin]

Colleagues:

Does anyone know if there are less-lossy XML parsers and serializers that can capture and reproduce the structure of the input XML file including tabulation,whitespace, etc. ? We would love to know about experiences with parse/serialization approaches that have a greater infoset than that provided by SAX and DOM, especially related to ignorable whitespace and attributes ordering/whitespace. We are editing XML and want to preserve the file as much as possible.

Kind regards,
Oleg Dulin
Opence, Inc.

 

[Andy Fish]

this makes a change, most people want to do exactly the opposite and think that parsers preserve too much whitespace

I would have thought that as long as you set the "ignore whitespace" flag off, sax and DOM would give you all the whitespace in the file - that has been my experience (unless you're using MSXML which seems to swallow much more whitespace than other parsers)