XML parsers consider several conditions when deciding which whitespace-only text nodes should be preserved during DOM construction. Unfortunately, those conditions are controlled by the document's DTD or by the content of document itself. Since it is often difficult to modify the DTD or the XML, this recipe simple removes all whitespace-only text nodes from a DOM node.
Python, 23 lines
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Copy to clipboard1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | def remove_whilespace_nodes(node, unlink=False):
"""Removes all of the whitespace-only text decendants of a DOM node.
When creating a DOM from an XML source, XML parsers are required to
consider several conditions when deciding whether to include
whitespace-only text nodes. This function ignores all of those
conditions and removes all whitespace-only text decendants of the
specified node. If the unlink flag is specified, the removed text
nodes are unlinked so that their storage can be reclaimed. If the
specified node is a whitespace-only text node then it is left
unmodified."""
remove_list = []
for child in node.childNodes:
if child.nodeType == dom.Node.TEXT_NODE and \
not child.data.strip():
remove_list.append(child)
elif child.hasChildNodes():
remove_whilespace_nodes(child, unlink)
for node in remove_list:
node.parentNode.removeChild(node)
if unlink:
node.unlink()
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This code should work with any correctly implemented Python-DOM.
Tags: xml
Error?
Right you are. Yes, I've updated the recipe.