[xquery-talk] preserving space in attribute content

[Howard Katz]

We could also rewrite the attribute as an element, as you're suggesting, but
since every other "object" in our system is represented as a attribute, it
would be quite non-standard to do it that way. But other than that, no other
really good reason for not doing so.

What's the &_ ... underscore in your entitized version btw?

Thank you. That was illuminating.
Howard 

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: Michael Kay [mailto:mhk at mhk.me.uk] 
 > Sent: June 6, 2006 2:23 PM
 > To: 'Howard Katz'; talk at xquery.com
 > Subject: RE: [xquery-talk] preserving space in attribute content
 > 
 > > 
 > > I need to preserve whitespace in an attribute, as in
 > > 
 > > <elem someAttr="     somecontent"/>
 > > 
 > > The space in other words is signficant and I don't want it 
 > > normalized away on processing. Is this doable?
 > 
 > Do it as you would in XML - entitize the spaces using &_#x20;.
 > 
 > You could also write
 > 
 > <elem someAttr="{'     somecontent'}"/>
 > 
 > However, it's not a good design to use attributes for content where
 > whitespace is significant: even if you get the whitespace 
 > into the result
 > document, it's liable to be normalized next time it sees the 
 > inside of an
 > XML parser.
 > 
 > Michael Kay
 > http://www.saxonica.com/
 >