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Answer 1

A:

xmlStr = ' '.join(xmlStr.split()))

This puts all text in one line replacing multiple white space with single blank.

xmlStr = ''.join(xmlStr.split()))

This would remove completely space including the spaces inside the text and can not be used.

The first form could be used with risk (but that you request), for the input you gave:

xmlStr = '''<root>
    <head></head>
    <content></content>
</root>'''
xmlStr = ' '.join(xmlStr.split())
print xmlStr
""" Output:
<root> <head></head> <content></content> </root>
"""

This would be valid xml. It would need to be though checked with some kind of xml checker maybe. Are you by the way sure you want XML? Have you read the article: Python Is Not Java

Tony Veijalainen 2010-07-22 15:45:06

-1 Your suggestion will trash anything like `"""<v xml:space="preserve">\t\tfoo</v>"""`

John Machin 2010-07-22 20:08:35

I'm going to have to agree with John. This doesn't preserve the XML syntax at all.

mattbasta 2010-07-22 22:25:13

Answer 2

A:

Whitespace is significant within an XML document. Using whitespace for indentation is a poor use of XML, as it introduces significant data where there really is none -- and sadly, this is the norm. Any programmatic approach you take to stripping out whitespace will be, at best, a guess - you need better knowledge of what the XML is conveying to properly remove whitespace, without stepping on some piece of data's toes.

Thanatos 2010-07-22 22:44:29

Answer 3

+2 A:

The easiest solution is probably using lxml, where you can set a parser option to ignore white space between elements:

>>> from lxml import etree
>>> parser = etree.XMLParser(remove_blank_text=True)
>>> xml_str = '''<root>
>>>     <head></head>
>>>     <content></content>
>>> </root>'''
>>> elem = etree.XML(xml_str, parser=p)
>>> print etree.tostring(elem)
<root><head/><content/></root>

This will probably be enough for your needs, but some warnings to be on the safe side:

This will just remove whitespace nodes between elements, and try not to remove whitespace nodes inside elements with mixed content:

>>> elem = etree.XML('<p> spam <a>ham</a> <a>eggs</a></p>', parser=parser)
>>> print etree.tostring(elem)
<p> spam <a>ham</a> <a>eggs</a></p>

Leading or trailing whitespace from textnodes will not be removed. It will however still in some circumstances remove whitespace nodes from mixed content: if the parser has not encountered non-whitespace nodes at that level yet.

>>> elem = etree.XML('<p><a> ham</a> <a>eggs</a></p>', parser=parser)
>>> print etree.tostring(elem)
<p><a> ham</a><a>eggs</a></p>

If you don't want that, you can use xml:space="preserve", which will be respected. Another option would be using a dtd and use etree.XMLParser(load_dtd=True), where the parser will use the dtd to determine which whitespace nodes are significant or not.

Other than that, you will have to write your own code to remove the whitespace you don't want (iterating descendants, and where appropriate, set .text and .tail properties that contain only whitespace to None or empty string)

Steven 2010-07-23 09:39:29

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Remove whitespaces in XML string

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