Nokogiri does not honor leading whitespace in some cases

[mratzloff]

Look at this weirdness!

require 'nokogiri'
include Nokogiri::XML

document = Document.new
document.root = Node.new('root', document)

foo = Node.new('foo', document)
foo.content = 'foo'
document.root << foo

foo << ' bar' # Notice the leading space

puts document.root

And this is the output:

<root>
  <foo>foobar</foo>
</root>

But it should be this instead, right?

<root>
  <foo>foo bar</foo>
</root>

Maybe you don't consider this a bug for some reason. If not, it would be nice to at least have the ability to set something like :preserve_whitespace => true on the parent node, or pass it in an options hash to Node#add_child() or something.

This is Nokogiri 1.5.0.beta.1 (gem), by the way.

Thanks!

[mratzloff]

Also, perhaps you'll say to just do this instead:

foo.content += ' bar'

That's fine, but what about this:

require 'nokogiri'
include Nokogiri::XML

document = Document.new
document.root = Node.new('root', document)

foo = Node.new('foo', document)
foo.content = 'foo'
document.root << foo

bar = Node.new('bar', document)
bar.content = 'bar'
foo << bar

foo << ' baz' # Notice the leading space

puts document.root

Results in this:

<root>
  <foo>foo<bar>bar</bar>baz</foo>
</root>

Can't do Node#content() there, and anyway it gets complicated.

[flavorjones]

The root of this issue is that we strip the tags before creating a DocumentFragment (which is then inserted into the document in the right place).

This stripping is done largely for historical reasons at this point. DocumentFragments used to be a niche use case, but have since become the core of nearly every node-creation API call, and so maybe we should revisit this convention for 1.5.

[mratzloff]

Yeah, currently the only workaround I've found is to set it twice. It's pretty goofy.

foo = "\nfoo"
node << foo
node.children.last.content = foo

Because naturally each way of setting content works differently. ;-)

[flavorjones]

{XML,HTML}::DocumentFragment.{new,parse} no longer strip leading and trailing whitespace. Closed by bbebdcc.