I’ve just resolved a very confusing bug in some of our MarkLogic XQuery code. It ultimately turned out to be very simple to fix – just adding an ‘indent=no’ parameter to the XSLT.<\/p>\n
However, there were three unexpected bits of behaviour that I encountered along the way, that made fixing it much harder than it should have been.<\/p>\n
First unexpected thing – MarkLogic was defaulting to ‘indent=yes’ in its XSLT processing.<\/p>\n
Second unexpected thing – MarkLogic is applying its indent setting to the results of <xsl:copy-of select=”.”\/>. I expected <textarea><xsl:copy-of select=”.”\/><\/textarea> to give me an exact copy of the input, but it doesn’t, because indent is applied to it. Saxon doesn’t apply indent here, even if indent is set to yes.<\/p>\n
Third unexpected thing – MarkLogic’s QConsole can’t be trusted to display whitespace accurately. I displayed two almost identical documents in exactly the same way, via doc(‘blah.xml’), in the console, and one of them was indented, and the other one wasn’t. These were the before-and-after documents for our ‘splitDocument’ function, so I naturally thought that splitDocument was applying indentation. It was only when I wrote Scala code to retrieve the XML that I saw what was happening.<\/p>\n
Lessons:<\/p>\n
1) Always turn on indent=’no’ in stylesheets used in MarkLogic
\n2) Don’t trust QConsole to debug whitespace issues. Instead, use code.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve just resolved a very confusing bug in some of our MarkLogic XQuery code. It ultimately turned out to be very simple to fix – just adding an ‘indent=no’ parameter to the XSLT. However, there were three unexpected bits of behaviour that I encountered along the way, that made fixing it much harder than it … Continue reading “Debugging whitespace issues in MarkLogic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}