Question

I’m developing an ASP.net application which outputs xml content in my aspx files.
This application works sort of like a RSS feeder.
One thing I have noticed which is quite bothering me is that lines containing server code will output an empty line in the final xml content, for example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<foo>
    <tagOne>
        <% If(something) Then %>
            <myText>something</myText>
        <% End If %>
    </tagOne>
</foo>

If something is true, this will output the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<foo>
    <tagOne>

            <myText>something</myText>

    </tagOne>
</foo>

How do I get rid of these empty lines without making the code one line only?

By creating only a single line I am making it rather difficult to edit in the future and some of these files contain 2000 or more lines of code which in a single line would be horrible to edit and maintain.

Answer 1

The server code seems to preserve the whitespace between XML tags. I’m not familiar with ASP but I’ve understood that the whitespace right after <% and right before %> is insignificant. Assuming that the whitespace inside the ASP “tags” is not preserved, you should be able to get rid of the extra whitespace and still preserve the indentation/formatting in your server code if you simply move the <% and/or %> markers so that the indentation is effectively inside the ASP command.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<foo>
    <tagOne><% 
        If(something) Then %>
            <myText>something</myText><%
        End If %>
    </tagOne>
</foo>