From: ser@... (Sean Russell)
Date: 2004-07-13T04:07:24+09:00
Subject: Re: REXML not quite doing what I need

Keith P Hodges <keith_hodges@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message news:<a0611040bbd1749936a3f@[192.168.0.100]>...
> Can anyone tell me if REXML cn bepersuaded to generate using double 
> quotes rather than single quotes

Nope.  You can submit a feature request, though, at:

   http://www.germane-software.com/cgi-bin/roundup/rexml

and I'll add it when I get a chance.  This week is pretty busy and I
haven't had any time to do any REXML work, but I should have some time
to work on it this weekend.

If you need to replace quotes with apostrophes, hack the
Attribute#to_string method in rexml/attribute.rb and just replace them
yourself.  It isn't an ideal solution, but it should suffice for a
short-term fix.

> I am also strugling to persuade REXML not give me attributes with 
> normalized values.

They should be normalized for proper XML.  REXML does not generate
HTML, which is an SGML language.  For instance, <br>s in HTML are not
closed.  There's a whole section in XSL that talks about how XML
should be re-formatted to be "proper" HTML.

> In the following
....
> I get
> 
> <a href="javascript:window.open(&apos;http:// .......... ">....</a>

REXML always uses apostrophes, so this can't really be what you're
getting.  In any case, there isn't a way to turn off normalization in
REXML attributes at the moment.

This shouldn't be a problem with modern browsers; I think even IE, as
non-conformant as it is, accepts entities in attributes.

--- SER