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Is it possible for a RegEx to clean up whitespace in HTML?
For example:
<p><b>foo</b> <i>bar</i></p>
<p>foo</p> <p>bar</p>
On the first line, the space between the closing b and opening i tag is valid (although it could be a ), however on the second line it is whitespace that I wish to clean up as it shouldn’t have any semantic value.
Perhaps this would be better solved with DOM traversal?
Seems like something like HTML Tidy would be a better bet for what you’re looking for – rather than needing to re-create all the potentially complex rules (such as your first whitespace in the example being significant, but not the 2nd, etc.)
Otherwise, I agree – DOM traversal would be a much better approach than regular expressions – especially if your HTML is already XHTML compliant and can be easily traversed as XML.