Diwaker Gupta wrote:
I think that it is doing too much, e.g. removing the
blank lines before major elements, e.g. <xsl:template>
Hmm, I can't seem to make Tidy not do this :-( Is this a blocker? If
not, then I'd like to stick with Tidy. If it is, read on.
I'm not sure if it is a blocker but I think it would be nice to retain
the blank lines if we can since it makes it a little easier to follow
the code, especially for someone like me that is relatively new to xml.
The question is, is there a tool that will do it? See below.
I was researching XML pretty printers a bit to see if we had
alternatives. It seems one can just write a simple stylesheet [1] to
clean up XML (since its part of the XSL language -- see the xsl:output
element [2])
[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200110/msg00620.html
[2] http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XSLTreference/Output/xslt_output.html
Although I haven't tried this method yet and its not configurable at
all. So I'm not sure how well it'll work.
I did go ahead and test this (using xalan:indent-amount="2" rather than
the saxon example) and it gave an identical file to the tidy file
(except that the line wrap was longer). It removed the blank lines as
well.
What I have used on the test files so far to clean them up with minimal
impact is jEdit with the Whitespace and XML Indenter plugins. The
whitespace cleans the tabs and spaces and the indenter sets the proper
depth and doesn't touch anything else. I assume other editors could do
similar things.
So do we all want to work with the same editor for cleaning or do we
want to use a cleaning tool and give up our blank lines in XML files?
- Addi
