Re: [libxml++] ignore empty text nodes

* Andrej van der Zee

> I am a happy user of libxmlpp for some time now. One thing I could not
> find out yet. How can I ignore empty text nodes?
[...]

Hi.

I have used the following XPath-based technique to remove such nodes in 
order to "normalize" XML-documents that are stored in pretty-printed 
format. The reason I had them stored pretty-printed, was to improve 
readability in a test suite. I would not use pretty-printing on XML that 
is going directly between machines.

void remove_whitespace_nodes(xmlpp::Document & doc)
{
     xmlpp::NodeSet whitespace_nodes = 
doc.get_root_node()->find("//text()[normalize-space()='']");
     for (xmlpp::NodeSet::const_iterator it = whitespace_nodes.begin();
          it != whitespace_nodes.end();
          ++it)
     {
         (*it)->get_parent()->remove_child(*it);
     }
}

Make sure the XPath above does not identify nodes that carries meaning 
to your application, otherwise you would have to refine it somehow.

-- 
Sincerely,
Knut Aksel Røysland