Liam,

Thank you for your help!  (And to all the other list members that helped with
this issue I send my "Thanks!")

The final solution, because I have a deadline, is to simply pre-process all
XML files using Perl regex (quick and easy), removing the empty <bold></bold>
elements.


Kind regards,

Raymond Lillibridge
Sr. Software Engineer
rlillibridge@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Municipal Code Corporation | Facebook | Twitter





-----Original Message-----
From: Liam R E Quin [mailto:liam@xxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 1:53 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE:  Saxon 9.4 <bold></bold> Transformed to (newline)</bold>
Problem

On Wed, 2013-01-16 at 17:53 +0000, Raymond Lillibridge wrote:
> Here is an update for this thread.
>
> Due to my need to process the output file further, using Perl (reading
> line by line), I need the paragraph content to not have any newlines
> or white-space introduced.  I also cannot use the @indent="no"
> attribute due to existing post process Perl applications.

Here's an (untested) example getline() that turns <bold> </bold> into
<bold/>.

The technique is to read a line at a time but to read multiple lines when
necessary.

Better yet is not to use line-at-a-time processing at all on a file format
that's not line oriented... however, I do this a lot as part of converting
line-oriented texts into XML.

Liam

sub getline()
{
    my $line = <>;

    return undef unless $line;

    while ($line =~ m{<bold>[^<>]*$}) {
        my $tmp = <>;
        if (!defined $tmp) { # EOF
           die "end of input inside <bold> element! oh dear!";
        }
        $line .= $tmp;
    }
    $line =~ s{<bold>\s*</bold>}{<bold/>}g;
    return $line;
}



--
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/ Pictures
from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml