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xmllint

Trim whitespace inside tags?

I'm using xmllint to re-format some xml. I notice it seems to leave enclosed text alone. For example, this

<tag>
<p>
<i>
test
</i>
</p>
</tag>

becomes this

<tag>
    <p>
        <i>
test
</i>
    </p>
</tag>

Is there a way to force it to put the text right after the opening tag and follow that immediately with the closing tag? Ideally I'd like something like this:

<tag>
    <p>
        <i>test</i>
    </p>
</tag>

I suppose that amounts to having it ignore leading and trailing whitespace inside tags. I can do it with some preprocessing via regex, but is there any native way?

TIA.

Solution

  • You should be able to use tidy for this:

    echo '<tag>
<p>
<i>
test
</i>
</p>
</tag>' |    tidy -xml -iq

    Output:

    <tag>
  <p>
    <i>test</i>
  </p>
</tag>