Nokogiri to_xml without carriage returns

Question

I\'m currently using the Nokogiri::XML::Builder class to construct an XML document, then calling .to_xml on it. The resulting string always contains a bunch of spaces, line

Answer 1

Builder#to_xml by default outputs formatted (i.e. indented) XML. You can use the Nokogiri::XML::Node::SaveOptions to get an almost unformatted result.

b = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do |xml|
  xml.root do
    xml.foo do
      xml.text("Value")
    end
  end
end

b.to_xml
#=> "\n\n  Value\n\n"

b.to_xml(:save_with => Nokogiri::XML::Node::SaveOptions::AS_XML)
#=> "\nValue\n"

Now you could either just get rid of the XML header (which is optional anyway) and remove the last newline

b.to_xml(:save_with => Nokogiri::XML::Node::SaveOptions::AS_XML | Nokogiri::XML::Node::SaveOptions::NO_DECLARATION).strip
#=> "Value"

Just removing any newlines in the XML is probably a bad idea as newlines can actually be significant (e.g. in

 blocks of XHTML). If that is not the case for you (and you are really sure of that) you could just do it.