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, linefeeds and carriage returns in between the nodes, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get rid of them. Here’s an example:

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

b.to_xml

This results in the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>Value</root>

What I want is this (notice the missing newline):

<?xml version="1.0"?><root>Value</root>

How can this be done? Thanks in advance!

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
# => "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n<root>\n  <foo>Value</foo>\n</root>\n"

b.to_xml(:save_with => Nokogiri::XML::Node::SaveOptions::AS_XML)
# => "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n<root><foo>Value</foo></root>\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
# => "<root><foo>Value</foo></root>"

Just removing all newlines in the XML is probably a bad idea as newlines can actually be significant (e.g. in <pre> blocks of XHTML). If that is not the case for you (and you are really sure of that) you could just do it.