[lxml-dev] Question about newlines

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Noah Slater wrote:
> When serialising a document there are two places that I would expect
> lxml to insert newlines and yet there are non.

Serialisation will never alter content.

That said, there is a separate serialisation API in libxml2 (the xmlSave*
functions) that inserts a newline at the end, maybe also after PIs (don't
know). But it will not be used in lxml for a while due to API stability issues.


>   1) When adding a PI via the element.addprevious method and PI has
>      it's tail trimmed and so when serialising the PI runs into the
>      root element.
>
>   2) At the very end of the document. POSIX states that all files must
>      end in a newline so I consider this to be a bug.

XML works on more systems than those that support POSIX. :)

One reason these don't happen automatically is that ET doesn't insert newlines
either. This is not a hard reason, and maybe we could even change this in 2.0.

I'll think about it. Any other opinions on this?

Stefan