Removing White Space from an XML Fragment

I recently encountered the need to remove extraneous white space from a string containing valid XML. Well, it probably wasn't absolutely necessary but I was tired of seeing a ton of "\r\n" and tabs in the values displayed in the Visual Studio debugger.

In any case, a quick search of the web uncovered a variety of approaches, most centering on setting the XmlDocument property preserveWhiteSpace to false. These didn't work for me since I wasn't dealing with an XML document but, rather, a string or fragment that contained XML.

However, I found on CodeProject.com an elegant solution using regular expressions:

xmlText = Regex.Replace(
            xmlText, @"(?=<[^=]+?>)(?=</?\w+\s+\w+)(<.*?)(\s+)(.*?>)",@"$1_$3",
            RegexOptions.CultureInvariant | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

where xmlText is the string which contains your XML fragment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using Reference Aliases

Image
I recently ran across a situation where two different libraries shared identical namespaces and class names. Visual Studio complained anytime I used one of these classes that it was an ambiguous reference. I needed both libraries -- each contained some unique elements -- so I couldn't ditch one or the other. But, as I said, anytime I tried to use a class that was common (again, via the class name and namespace), I received the ambiguous reference error. This was a real problem, so say the least. However, C# provides a way to specify exactly which library (reference) you mean when you use an object that's common to two or more libraries. Simply put, you use an extern alias  statement. The concept is fairly simple: Give the reference an alias (I used the Properties windows for the reference). Add an extern alias statement, putting it before your using statements. Add a using statement, which effectively links a specific object through the extern alias statement to th
Read more

List of Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

Here's a link to a great list of keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio: 149 Shortcuts for Visual Studio 2015 (Windows) While there's no need to memorize the list (that's why someone has created a cheat sheet, after all), it certainly doesn't hurt to look over the list from time to time and try to add one more command to your repertoire.
Read more