[jdom-interest] XMLOutputter behavior

[guru at stinky.com]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 01:03:40PM -0700, Jason Hunter wrote:
> guru at stinky.com wrote:
> > 
> > One problem is, the default (no-frills) XMLOutputter outputs a newline
> > at the very end of the document.  But the Javadoc says it adds *no*
> > line breaks.  I'd like to change it so it outputs no trailing newline.
> > Is anyone depending on that final line break?
> 
> Right now we're adding new lines after the decl, after the doctype, and
> after the last node.  We do this always.  This is because when build
> with a SAX parser JDOM is not told about whitespace outside the root
> element, nor could JDOM hold the whitespace in its object model, so
> without those new lines the output would have no whitespace outside the
> root, and that's not how most people write their documents.
> 
> Having setNewlines() trigger the newlines is insufficient because for
> round tripping you want to preserve the same whitespace in the file. 
> You don't want to add new lines in the root to get newlines outside the
> root.

OK, but do we really want *two* closing newlines when setNewlines is
turned on?

> It may be appropriate to have another set method that could turn off the
> extra newlines.

One for each?  Or three binary flags?  I'm thinking

setExtraNewlines(boolean)
setExtraNewlines(int which)
public static final int NEWLINES_DECLARATION = 1
public static final int NEWLINES_DOCTYPE = 2
public static final int NEWLINES_ENDOFDOCUMENT = 4

e.g.

outputter.setExtraNewlines(NEWLINES_DECLARATION | NEWLINES_ENDOFDOCUMENT)

(Low priority, naturally, but I might get around to it.)

BTW, I'm also adding a comment that no matter what the value of
lineSeparator is, newlines embedded inside text nodes will be printed
verbatim -- they're not converted from \n to \r\n, e.g.

-- 
Alex Chaffee                       mailto:alex at jguru.com
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