Thanks for your comments. I should have tried the tests, sorry. If by the 2000 warning messages you mean

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at D:/Perl/s
+ite/lib/XML/SAX/Expat.pm line 198.
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then I do get those with the original version as well! XML::SAX::Expat ver. 0.35.

In this case I don't think there is a need for a new option, at most new values for NormaliseSpace. Let's say -1 = keep the whitespace if there are no subtags and -2 = keep all whitespace.

#against original version
line 925
<<      next if($val =~ m{^\s*$}s);  # Skip all whitespace content
>>      next if ($self->{opt}->{normalisespace} >= 0 and $val =~ m{^\s
+*$}s);  # Skip all whitespace content

line 992
>>  if ($self->{opt}->{normalisespace} == -1 and ref($attr->{$self->{o
+pt}->{contentkey}}) eq 'ARRAY'
>>   and !grep( !m{^\s*$}s, @{$attr->{$self->{opt}->{contentkey}}})) {
>>    delete $attr->{$self->{opt}->{contentkey}};
>>  }
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All tests pass this time.

It would be great if this patch was accepted, otherwise I'll just have to use the tweaked XML::Simple as the "thin wrapper", instead of wasting time writing my own :-)