Question

How does one tell the XML parser to honor leading and trailing whitespace?

Dim xml: Set xml = CreateObject('MSXML2.DOMDocument') xml.async = False xml.loadxml '<xml>1 2</xml>' wscript.echo len(xml.documentelement.text) 

Above prints out 3.

Dim xml: Set xml = CreateObject('MSXML2.DOMDocument') xml.async = False xml.loadxml '<xml> 2</xml>' wscript.echo len(xml.documentelement.text) 

Above prints out 1. (I’d like it to print 2).

Is there something special I can put in the xml document itself to tell the parser to keep leading and trailing whitespace in the document?

CLARIFICATION 1: Is there an attribute that can be specificed ONCE at the beginning of the document to apply to all elements?

CLARIFICATION 2: Because the contents of the entities may have unicode data, but the xml file needs to be plain ascii, all entities are encoded — meaning CDATA’s unfortunately are not available.

Answer 1

As I commented, all answers recommending the usage of the xml:space='preserve' are wrong.

The xml:space attribute can only be used to control the treatment of whitespace-only nodes, that is text nodes composed entirely of whitespace characters.

This is not at all the case with the current problem.

In fact, the code provided below correctly obtains a length of 2 for the text node contained in:

<xml> 2</xml> 

Here is the VB code that correctly gets the length of the text node (do not forget to add a reference to ‘Microsoft XML, v 3.0’):

Dim xml As MSXML2.DOMDocument Private Sub Form_Load() Set xml = CreateObject('MSXML2.DOMDocument') xml.async = False xml.loadxml '<xml> 2</xml>' Dim n n = Len(xml.documentelement.selectSingleNode('text()').nodeValue) wscript.echo Len(n) End Sub 

If you put a breakpoint on the line:

wscript.echo Len(n) 

you’ll see that when the debugger breaks there, the value of n is 2, as it is required.

Therefore, this code is the solution that was being sought.