How to remove the white spaces between tags in XML

Question

I created an XML document using Java in my android application. I have to call a web service in my application and pass this XML as an argument there. But my problem is ther

Answer 1

You can create a copy of all nodes in a document, and trims the nodeValue of each node if it exists.

const copyChildrenNodesWithoutWhiteSpace = (document) => {
  const clone = document.cloneNode();

  for (const child of document.childNodes) {
    const childCopy = copyChildrenNodesWithoutWhiteSpace(child);
    clone.appendChild(childCopy);

    if (childCopy.nodeValue) {
      childCopy.nodeValue = childCopy.nodeValue.trim();
    }
  }

  return clone;
};

const result = copyChildrenNodesWithoutWhiteSpace(anyDocument);

Answer 2

This worked for me, thank you. As a caveat, although this is actually useful for my purpose, I noticed that it can also remove text content if that consists only of whitespace. For example, running the following:

String xmlIn = "<tag> </tag> <tag>\t</tag>\t <tag>\r\n</tag><tag> text </tag>";
String xmlOut = xmlIn.replaceAll("(?:>)(\\s*)<", "><");
System.out.println(xmlOut);

gives the following:

<tag></tag><tag></tag><tag></tag><tag> text </tag>

Answer 3

None of the other answers worked for me. I had to use the below code, to remove both additional whitespaces and new lines.

xmlString.trim().replace("\n", "").replaceAll("( *)<", "<")

Answer 4

I was able to remove whitespace/tabs/newlines from my transformation using the following property:

transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "no");

You had it set to yes. I'm sure this question is old enough that it doesn't matter now; but if anyone runs into this in the future, setting the property to no saved me.

Answer 5

Of course, it depends on your XML itself. However, you could try using regular expressions.

As an example:

yourXmlAsString.replaceAll(">[\\s\r\n]*<", "><");

Would remove all whitespace between every XML element.

Answer 6

Method documentBuilderFactory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace() controls whitespace creation. Use this before you create a DocumentBuilder.

dbfac.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);