Question

By default, LibXML will render empty tags as <tag />, but I need to have it render them as <tag></tag>.

Is there an option I missed in the documentation, or do I have to tweek the output with regexp replacements (or any other solution you might know of) ?

I’m looking for a better way of doing it in the place of:

$xml = $dom->serialize(0);
$xml =~ s/<([a-z]+)([^>]*?)\/>/<$1$2><\/$1>/gsi;

Answer 1

LibXML has a formerly documented feature, that might be considered deprecated as it’s not in the documentation for the latest version, but it’s still in the test files, so it might work.

All serialization functions understand the flag setTagCompression. if this Flag is set to 1 empty tags are displayed as <foo></foo> rather than <foo/>.

my $xml = do {
    local $XML::LibXML::setTagCompression = 1;
    $doc->toString();
};