asked on

Can I use regex to strip out xml whitespace?

Hello all,

I'm doing a lot of work with XML, but there are some cases where it would be faster to just deal with the XML data as a string.
Changing it to a string isn't a problem, but there's some whitespace that gets added in between the nodes that's throwing me off.

Can I structure a regular expression that can strip out the whitespace in between the nodes of the string?

I've done simple expressions with 'g' for replace-all commands, but nothing quite like this.

Any assistance would definitely be appreciated.

Thanks!

HonorGod

In what language?

Perl:
$data =~ s/\s+//g;

Python:
data = data.replace( ' ', '');

Java:
str = new String( str.replaceAll( "\s+", '' );

Inward_Spiral

ASKER

JavaScript, actually.

I'm pulling in some XML text from the server via AJAX, which sometimes has whitespace (spaces, carriage returns, etc.), and can come in like this sometimes:
<RootNode>
<ParentNode>
<ChildNode>Text</ChildNode>
</ParentNode>
</RootNode>

I'd like to strip the string of all spacing between the "><" brackets:
<RootNode><ParentNode><ChildNode>Text</ChildNode></ParentNode></RootNode>

Does that help?
Thanks.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

wnross

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Inward_Spiral

ASKER

Thanks Bill, that was exactly what I needed.

wnross

No problem, thanks for the points

Cheers,
-Bill