Tab And New Line in XML data

Question

I have a formatted text which I store as a text node. By default the new line char's are converted into white spaces. I read elsewhere on this forum, that we should use the charecter entity reference equivalent &#A; for new line. I did not understand this idea clearly, so I tried this out:
In my formatted string, I replaced all instances of '\n' with '&#A;'. I create my text node as follows:
script.replaceAll("\n","&#A;");
scriptElement = document.createTextNode(script);
As expected when the XML is written the &#A10; is further encoded into "&#A10". And when I read back my XML from the parser, I get my string back with all the "&#A10;". I again need to do a replace all to get the new line charecters back.
My question is : Is there any other standard solution to this problem or the bottom line is to replace the new line and tabs with "MUMBOJUMBO" or a standard charecter entity ref and look for the same while reading back.
Is there anyway I could tell my XMLwriter to convert '\n' into "&#A;" and get back '\n' when I parse the XML?

Answer 1

by default, all white spaces collapse: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#white-space-collapse
you can use xml:space="preserve" in your XML elements (tags) or
you can use <fo:block white-space-collapse="false" linefeed-treatment="preserve"> in XSL if you use XSL to format the XML.