This is a continuation to XML::Rules and whitespace handling to inform you that I am (unless there are bugs of course or someone can convince me to add some more options) done with the changes proposed in that node, except that I decided during the implementation that I'll define the options a bit differently:

=head2 Whitespace handling

There are two options that affect the whitespace handling: 
stripspaces and normalisespaces. The normalisespaces is a simple flag 
+that 
controls whether multiple spaces/tabs/newlines are collapsed into 
a single space or not. The stripspaces is more complex, it's a bit-mas
+k,
an ORed combination of the following options:

  0 - don't remove whitespace around tags
    (around tags means before the opening tag and after the closing ta
+g, not in the tag's content!)
  1 - remove whitespace before tags whose rules did not return any tex
+t content
    (the rule specified for the tag caused the data of the tag to be i
+gnored,
    processed them already or added them as attributes to parent's \%a
+ttr)
  2 - remove whitespace around tags whose rules did not return any tex
+t content
  3 - remove whitespace around all tags

  0 - remove only whitespace-only content
    (that is remove the whitespace around <foo/> in this case "<bar>  
+ <foo/>   </bar>"
    but not this one "<bar>blah   <foo/>  blah</bar>")
  4 - remove trailing/leading whitespace
    (remove the whitespace in both cases above)

  0 - don't trim content
  8 - do trim content
    (That is for "<foo>  blah   </foo>" only pass to the rule {_conten
+t => 'blah'})


That is if you have a data oriented XML in which each tag contains eit
+her text
content or subtags, but not both, you want to use
stripspaces => 3 or stripspaces => 3|4. This will not only make sure y
+ou don't 
need to bother with the whitespace-only _content of the tags with subt
+ags, 
but will also make sure you do not keep on wasting memory while parsin
+g a huge 
XML and processing the "twigs". Without that option the parent tag of
the repeated tag would keep on accumulating unneeded whitespace in its
+ _content.
[download]

I did not release the module on the unsuspecting public yet even though the tests seem to pass. I have to admit I did not review the complete huge t\08-whitespace_more.t so it may accept (or rather require) an incorrect behaviour.

I would be most grateful if a few interested people downloaded the new version of the module from http://jenda.krynicky.cz/perl/test/XML-Rules-0.22.tar.gz (or via PPM from http://jenda.krynicky.cz/perl/test/XML-Rules.ppd) and gave it a shot and let me know if anything works unlike they expected.