White space handling dbms_xmlstore.insertxml

Question

Hi,
I have a question about white space handling.
I have a column in table which holds white space character.
When I loading xml file using dbms_xmlstore.insertxml white space is converted into NULL and inserted into table.
It would fail if the column type is not null.
How do I handle it?
======================================================
Alternatively, how do I insert a tag with only whitespace in it into a table?
<Tag> </Tag> [One whitespace]
To elaborate the question
If I have following data in xml file ...
=============================================
<Rowset>
<Row>
<Tag1> </Tag1>
<Tag2>1</Tag1>
</Row>
</Rowset>
I have to load this data into
table tab1...
create table tab1 (tag1 varchar2(5), tag2 number);
How do I achieve it using dbms_xmlstore so that I can read the whitespace in XML and load it correctly into the table?
========================================================================
To use an alternate approach, I also tried the following.....
I tried the following test program on the xml file also shown below....
XML File is
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<SYS_NAME> a </SYS_NAME>
<SYS_SERIAL_NUM>000000</SYS_SERIAL_NUM>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>
And small procedure is
create or replace procedure PRO_TEST
as
o_sys_name varchar(10);
spacetag varchar2(10) := ' ';
begin
--execute immediate 'create global temporary table gt_xmltype_tab1 (xmlfile1 xmltype)';
insert into gt_xmltype_tab(xmlfile1)
values(XMLType(bfilename('RESTOREDIR','ADTL_SETUP_OPTIONS.xml'),nls_charset_id('AL32UTF8')));
select extractvalue (value(x), '/ROW/SYS_NAME')
into o_sys_name
from gt_xmltype_tab gt, TABLE(XMLSequence(extract(gt.xmlfile1, '/ROWSET/ROW'))) x;
dbms_output.put_line('[' || o_sys_name || ']');
dbms_output.put_line('ASCII:- ' || ascii(o_sys_name));
if o_sys_name = ' ' then
--if o_sys_name = chr(32) then
dbms_output.put_line('I found space');
else
dbms_output.put_line('I found no space');
end if;
commit;
end;
When Tag is <sys_nam> </sys_name> I get [] in the output(empty).
When Tag is <sys_nam> a</sys_name> I get [ a] in the output(space and a).
When Tag is <sys_nam> a </sys_name> I get [ a ] in the output(space a space).
When I has some character along with the whitespace, behaviour is correct and as expected.
But when the tag contains only whitespace the output is empty.
I cant seem to get around this problem.
Upon receiving empty string, other sub systems which are reading the data stop working.
Can someone help here?
Edited by: userAtoZ on May 14, 2011 2:57 PM

Answer 1

White space handling dbms_xmlstore.insertxmlYou may replace all whitespaces with its corresponding html entity:
SQL> create table test (v varchar2 (5))
Table created.
SQL> declare
  ctx   sys.dbms_xmlstore.ctxtype := dbms_xmlstore.newcontext ('test');
  doc   xmltype := xmltype(replace('<ROW><V> </V></ROW>',' ', '&#38;#32;'));
  ret   int;
begin
  ret := dbms_xmlstore.insertxml (ctx, doc);
  dbms_xmlstore.closecontext (ctx);
end;
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> select v, length (v), ascii(v) from test
V             LENGTH(V)        ASCII(V)
                      1              32
1 row selected.