why tempspace results here??

Question

if we supposed that "A.B." is a value for an xml element called given-names the following code converts this value to "A.tempspacetempspaceB." instead of "A. B."

foreach (XElement initial in doc.XPathSelectElements("//given-names"))
{
    string v = initial.Value.Replace(".", ". ").TrimEnd(' ');
    initial.SetValue(v);
}

So why tempspace comes here instead of literal space??

Answer 1

Have you tried decomposing your method calls to see if that works?

e.g.:

string v = initial.Value.Replace(".", ". ");
v = v.TrimEnd(@"\s+");
initial.SetValue(v);

Also, have you checked that your text encodings match? The encoding of the XML you're parsing is likely to be Unicode, whereas the default encoding for a string in C# is US-ASCII. I'm not sure if that will make a difference, but it might be worth checking.

Answer 2

First of all space is illegal inside XML tag name and if you are in DOM or DOM-related object (which you are :-) he's going to fight you to extinction any time you try to break core XML grammar - may even call cops if you insit :-)). I'm surprised it didn't just throw at you when you tried. It just can't let you do it since it wouldn't be XML anymore.

Check out NMTOKEN definition.

Answer 3

Your code gave me the expected results when I tested it. I order to try it, I threw together a little test in a console app. I used the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<root>
    <user>
        <given-names>A.B.</given-names>
    </user>
    <user>
        <given-names>Y.Z.</given-names>
    </user>
</root>

Then I created a fresh console application project and threw this in the Program class:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("XMLFile1.xml");

        foreach (XElement initial in doc.XPathSelectElements("//given-names"))
        {
            string v = initial.Value.Replace(".", ". ").TrimEnd(' ');
            initial.SetValue(v);
        }

        Console.WriteLine(doc.ToString());
    }
}

It produced the desired output:

<root>
    <user>
        <given-names>A. B.</given-names>
    </user>
    <user>
        <given-names>Y. Z.</given-names>
    </user>
</root>

There must be something else causing the problem here. What sort of environment are you working in? How are you converting the XDocument to a string for output?