Removing whitespace in XElement closing tag

Question

I have some XML that I am building that looks like this:

<actionitem actiontaken="none" target="0" targetvariable="0">
  <windowname>Popup Window</windowname>
  <windowposx>-1</windowposx>
  <windowposy>-1</windowposy>
  <windowwidth>-1</windowwidth>
  <windowheight>-1</windowheight>
  <noscrollbars>false</noscrollbars>
  <nomenubar />
  <notoolbar />
  <noresize />
  <nostatus />
  <nolocation />
  <browserWnd />
</actionitem>

This XML has to be to the exact specifications of the client, meaning I can't have a whitespace in the closing tag. I know that MSDN says this:

When writing an empty element, an additional space is added between tag name and the closing tag, for example . This provides compatibility with older browsers.

But, the client won't/can't budge on this. So, I thought I could try something like this to remedy the problem:

xelement.ReplaceWith(" />", "/>");

But when I run the program, I get this error message:

Non white space characters cannot be added to content.

So, does anyone know how I can remove that white space once I've built the XML document?

Answer 1

I don't know of a way to do it using an XElement, the best option will be to read the Xml as text but to avoid unnecessary excess string allocation, do it via a string builder:

var element = new XElement...;

var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter(stringBuilder))
{
    element.Save(stringWriter);
}

stringBuilder.Replace(" />", "/>");
var xml = stringBuilder.ToString();

Console.WriteLine(xml);

Any method which does a .ToString().Replace() is going to be far more costly in terms of memory usage.

The worrying thing about your client's comment is that it sounds like they have a home made xml parser which isn't very good, the whitespace in a self closing tag should not make a difference.

Answer 2

I would read XML content as text then Replace the spaces like this:

var lines = File.ReadAllLines("path");
for(int i=0;i<lines.Length;i++)
{
   if (lines[i].Contains(" />")) lines[i] = lines[i].Replace(" />", "/>");
}
File.WriteAllLines("path", lines);