Documenting how to filter out newlines from the parsed model

[thbar]

Just sharing a bit of code I'm using. For some context, I'm starting to use Saxy to build XML queries during testing. I must compare them to a baseline template, to ensure I used the Saxy.XML API correctly. These templates include newlines for human readability (indented/pretty-printed).

To make the comparison automated, I'm removing the non-significant newlines with the following code so far:

defmodule Stripper do
  def filter_newlines_from_model({element, tags, children}) do
    {
      element,
      tags,
      children
      |> Enum.map(&filter_newlines_from_model/1)
      |> Enum.reject(&is_nil/1)
    }
  end

  def filter_newlines_from_model(content) when is_binary(content) do
    if content |> String.trim() == "", do: nil, else: content
  end
end

I can use this like this afterwards:

    {:ok, parsed_request} = Saxy.SimpleForm.parse_string(xml, cdata_as_characters: false)
    IO.inspect(Stripper. filter_newlines_from_model(parsed_request))

This makes it easier to compare this using ExUnit assert x == y, for instance.

I wonder if:

• this is worth adding to the documentation as an example
• or if it could be an interesting option for Saxy.SimpleForm.parse_string(less sure at this point, we can mull over this!)

Let me know what you think!

[qcam]

I think we can support an option like ignore_whitespaces: true in SimpleForm.parse_string. That would be helpful in this case. The option should default to false though to keep original behavior though.

[thbar]

I will mull over this ; I am not 100% sure it is useful outside of testing. Will comment here later, thanks for the input!