leading and trailing spaces in xml tags

adamt222

Hi,
I am trying to convert an xml file.

Not by parsing- but by reading in 1 line at a time
and removing the leading and trailing spaces.

I'm not trying to remove spaces within the tags:
i.e.
<para>This text can have spaces, so it is okay</para>

what i am trying to resolve is a ton of extra whitespace
inbetween a closing tag for an element
and the opening tag of the next element... as in

					</A.OPTION>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
&nbsp;&nbsp;</A.OPTIONS>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
			&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;  </QUESTION>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;			</Q.GROUP>

you see, how the tags are all over the place?

In Perl, the lines of code to do a substitution that
were working for me was

s/^\s+//g; # Trim leading whitespace
s/\s+$//g; # Trim trailing whitespace

But, the few things i have tried in PHP that are similar
are not accomplishing the same thing.

I have tried eregi_replace()
and have tried preg_replace()

Am i missing something??
Can anyone help?
Thanks-
Adam

DonChris

hi adamt222,

i do not know if i understood exactly what you want but the 'trim'-function might help you:
$test=' bla ';
$test=trim($test);
echo $test;

'bla'

hth
chris

adamt222

Hi,

I tried to do a trim on it, it did not work.

sorry.

What's happening in my file, is when i load it into
an editor, the editor is adding spaces after closing tags
and before opening tags, and it is causing
problems when i use the xml file with a page-layout program.