xml - Preserving attribute whitespace

Question

Disclaimer: the following is a sin against XML. That's why I'm trying to change it with XSLT :)

My XML currently looks like this:

<root>
    <object name="blarg" property1="shablarg" property2="werg".../>
    <object name="yetanotherobject" .../>
</root>

Yes, I'm putting all the textual data in attributes. I'm hoping XSLT can save me; I want to move toward something like this:

<root>
    <object>
        <name>blarg</name>
        <property1>shablarg</name>
        ...
    </object>
    <object>
        ...
    </object>
</root>

I've actually got all of this working so far, with the exception that my sins against XML have been more... exceptional. Some of the tags look like this:

<object description = "This is the first line

This is the third line.  That second line full of whitespace is meaningful"/>

I'm using xsltproc under linux, but it doesn't seem to have any options to preserve whitespace. I've attempted to use xsl:preserve-space and xml:space="preserve" to no avail. Every option I've found seems to apply to keeping whitespace within the elements themselves, but not the attributes. Every single time, the above gets changed to:

This is the first line This is the third line.  That second line full of whitespace is meaningful

So the question is, can I preserve the attribute whitespace?

Answer 1

This is actually a raw XML parsing problem, not something XSLT can help you with. An XML parse must convert the newlines in that attribute value to spaces, as per ‘3.3.3 Attribute-Value Normalization’ in the XML standard. So anything currently reading your description attributes and keeping the newlines in is doing it wrong.

You may be able to recover the newlines by pre-processing the XML to escape the newlines to & #10; character references, as long as you haven't also got newlines where charrefs are disallowed, such as inside tag bodies. Charrefs should survive as control characters through to the attribute value, where you can then turn them into text nodes.