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Formatting XML Files With “White Space”

Article Number: 1804 | Rating: Unrated | Last Updated: Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 5:00 PM

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Formatting XML Files With "White Space”

XML standards are to ignore any formatting characters — such as spaces, tabs, carriage returns and line feed characters — that appear outside of actual data. This allows XML files, including Datafile templates, to be formatted for text display with elements on separate lines, child elements to be indented compared to their parent element, and closing tags to appear directly underneath their paired opening tag. Such formatting characters embedded within an XML file are known collectively as "whitespace”.

Whitespace is either ignored entirely if it precedes the start of an element tag or follows a closing element tag ("<” and ">” respectively), or is considered the same as a single space character anywhere else — where it acts as, for example, separators between attributes. The data contents of an element would not normally start or end with whitespace, and in fact the Datafile XML module will strip such whitespace. Spaces can, of course, be found within element data, and these are left intact.

In practice, many XML files are sent as a text stream without any whitespace at all. This makes them very difficult to read visually if the need should arise, although the target processor will not care whether whitespace is present or not.

Unformatted XML files may be viewed and printed in a formatted way by opening them with a web browser that recognises XML files — such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 5.50 or later). In addition, a Datafile facility is supplied to allow XML files to be printed in a formatted way.

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