I’ve found what appears to be a bug in the builder library, but don’t
know where to report it. The problem occurs when using indentation
(i.e. :indent > 0) and when the most deeply nested command contains a
block that returns just text, i.e. if it uses << or contains a
Builder::XmlMarkup.new that targets the builder object above it. This
causes the indentation to break down, placing a newline after the
opening tag, setting the text against the left margin, and then
indenting the closing tag.
The source of the problem is the loop between the block part of the
method_missing method and the _nested_structures method in xmlbase.rb.
It works if the lowest level command contains a simple text argument
(e.g. xml.name(author.name)), but not otherwise. I have worked around it
by redefining text!(text) as _text(text), thus switching off all
escaping of text, but that is not a fix.
It would, however, be useful to have a global option that turns off
escaping, so that one could simply use the ordinary text argument. I am
trying to produce human-readable documents, hence the indentation, and
don’t want my accented letters and typographical symbols turned into
numbers. In addition, some of my input contains presentational markup
elements, such as , etc, that should not be
escaped.
I am not a professional programmer, and not good enough to offer a fix
to the problem (although I could probably manage setting up the global
option). This does, however, make me realize that thanks to Rails I am
actually doing things that I would not even have thought of attempting a
couple of years ago, so many thanks to all who work on such an excellent
project.
indenting the closing tag.
Is it a case of calling _indent (which generates the spaces at the
start of a line) or of creating the new instance of XmlMarkup with the
appropriate indent and level ?
If you turn off escaping you may produce invalid xml.
I realized I should have provided some code to reproduce the bug.
This will do it:
xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent => 2)
xml.author do
xml.name do |n|
n << ‘Charles Dickens’
This isn’t a bug. The very definition of << is that it appends text to
the output completely unmolested. Like i said you can use _indent,
_newline etc… if you want to generate that whitespace. I suppose you
could override _escape to be a no-op if you had to.
No, it’s a case of the loop only exiting properly if the last command
doesn’t
have a simple argument but calls another block. If there is no
indentation,
then there is no extra space to put in and all appears to work fine,
but with
indentation switched on the indentation gets placed between the text
and
the end tag. There is no problem about the unescaped XML. It is all
produced in utf8 and validates against the DocBook 5.0 schema (the
documentation of which appears to encourage the direct entering of
unescaped text in utf8).
I have examined the code in xmlbase.rb, and the problem is clearly
what
ought to happen given the way the code is written, i,e,
So you get an indented start tag, a newline, no indent for the text
(because
there is no tag to indent), and an indented end tag. If you include
tags
within the block, then you simply shift the problem one level up.
That white space doesn’t come from <<, it’s coming from the name tag
(ie it’s assuming that after Charles dickens there would have been a
newline).
<< literally just appends the text you give it to the output. no
cleverness going on
If you add in the whitespace then it will format nicely, ie
xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent => 2)
xml.author do
xml.name do |n|
xml.send :_indent
n << ‘Charles Dickens’
xml.send :_newline
end
produces
Charles Dickens
You could of course to redefine text!
class Builder::XmlMarkup
def text!(text)
_text(text)
end
end
which allows you do to do
xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent => 2)
xml.author do
xml.name(‘charles & dickens’)
end
The whole point is that it does produce the whitespace!
This is not what I want. I want nicely formatted XML
with the tags wrapped around the text, or at least
aligned. The code I showed produces:
Charles Dickens
As the level of nesting gets deeper, so the amount of
whitespace grows. Using the following:
xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:indent => 2)
xml.author do
xml.name(‘Alexander Pope’)
end
produces
Alexander Pope
which is what I want, except that the outpur is escaped.
I realize that this is a minor issue, but the library is
not doing what it is supposed to do.