[jdom-interest] Still to do - Text 'merger'

[Rolf Lear]

Hi all.

I have been playing with a problem related to multiple-adjacent-text
content in Elements. For example:

Element root = new Element("Root");
root.addContent(new Text("Hello"));
root.addContent(new Text(" "));
root.addContent(new Text("World!"));

I think there is a useful concept of 'merging' consecutive Text items in
to one. The code is simple enough, and I have written it, and it works.
This is similar to the 'normalize' function of DOM's Node.

The questions are:
1. Should the code be part of the JDOM API? Is it useful?
2. The way I have it now is as a method on Element, which, for example,
you call root.runTheMergeMethod() and it *recursively* scans the Element
(and child Elements) for consecutive Text items and merges them. Should the
method be recursive, or should it be at the current element only. Perhaps
there should be two versions, one is recursive, the other is not.
3. What should the methods be called?
4. Should it be accessible through the JDOM Document too, or just the root
element?

Ideas?

Rolf