Removing ignorable whitespace from DOM document

Question

Dear all,
I am trying to read in an XML document that contains a lot of ignorable whitespace between elements. I am using the DOM model to parse and read in the file. Is there an easy way to tell the parser to ignore all ignorable whitespace characters in text nodes? Or do I have to write a routine to pre-process the DOM document?
(xml:space="default" is set in the root element)
Thanks a lot in advance!
Netwundi

Answer 1

I agree DrClap with your assertion. However, having read normalize(), it does seem quirky. According to the Javadocs for Node:
public void normalize()
Puts all Text nodes in the full depth of the sub-tree underneath this Node, including attribute nodes, into a "normal" form where only structure (e.g., elements, comments, processing instructions, CDATA sections, and entity references) separates Text nodes, i.e., there are neither adjacent Text nodes nor empty Text nodes. This can be used to ensure that the DOM view of a document is the same as if it were saved and re-loaded, and is useful when operations (such as XPointer lookups) that depend on a particular document tree structure are to be used.In cases where the document contains CDATASections, the normalize operation alone may not be sufficient, since XPointers do not differentiate between Text nodes and CDATASection nodes.- Saish