Re: How to retain the end tag when outputting an empty

> Using this (admittedly simplified) theory of XML processing, though, the
answer to bhow to get <duck></duck> instead of <duck/>b is
> $ perl -pe 's,<([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9._-]+)/>,<$1></$1>,g;' < INPUT.xml >
OUTPUT.xml
> or similar.
>


And, like all attempts to process XML using regular expressions, it is of
course wrong.

- It won't match an empty element tag that contains whitespace or attributes

- It will match things that aren't empty element tags, because they occur in
comments or CDATA.

So if you have a document with a comment that says:

<!-- The code below changes <x/> to <x></x> -->

then be prepared for your comments to be garbled.

Michael Kay
Saxonica