Question

According to this question:

Are line breaks in XML attribute values allowed?

line breaks in XML attributes are perfectly valid (although perhaps not recommended):

<xmltag1>
    <xmltag2 attrib="line 1
line 2
line 3">
    </xmltag2>
</xmltag1>

When I parse such XML using LINQ to XML (System.Xml.Linq), those line breaks are converted silently to space ' ' characters.

Is there any way to tell the XDocument.Load() parser to preserve those line breaks?

P.S.: The XML I’m parsing is written by third-party software, so I cannot change the way the line breaks are written.

Answer 1

If you want line breaks in attribute values to be preserved then you need to write them with character references e.g.

<foo bar="Line 1.&#10;Line 2.&#10;Line3."/>

as other wise the XML parser will normalize them to spaces, according to the XML specification http://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#AVNormalize.

[edit] If you want to avoid the attribute value normalization then loading the XML with a legacy XmlTextReader helps:

            string testXml = @"<foo bar=""Line 1.
Line 2.
Line 3.""/>";

            XDocument test;
            using (XmlTextReader xtr = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(testXml)))
            {
                xtr.Normalization = false;
                test = XDocument.Load(xtr);
            }
            Console.WriteLine("|{0}|", test.Root.Attribute("bar").Value);

That outputs

|Line 1.
Line 2.
Line 3.|