a well formed cupcake
Here’s a simple little sprinkle for anyone wondering how to serve xml with self-closing tags in Scala.
The basic cooking ingredients in Scala’s xml kitchen will output closing tags, even when the recipe does not call for them.
val selfClosingCupcake = <cupcake />
Will always unsuspectingly return
<cupcake></cupcake>
When your cupcakes are html tags, sometimes the extra closing tag is not valid.
The output
<link rel="stylesheet" href="cupcakes.css"></link>
may be tasty, but is less than valid.
The solution is simple. Sprinkle your xml with xml.Xhtml.
val selfClosingCupcake = xml.Xhtml.toXhtml(<cupcake/>)
This yields pretty much what you’d expect.
<cupcake/>
sweet teething
Beware of a few caveats.
Always put this call to toXhtml at the end of your processing pipeline as this returns a String rather than one of the handful of native xml types Scala provides.
If you were wondering, yes you can always step back into that native kitchen with XML.loadString
xml.XML.loadString(xml.Xhtml.toXhtml(<cupcake />))
Also of note.
Be aware of the xml api changes between Scala 2.7.* and 2.8.*
Scala 2.7.7.final requires you to pass in two extra args.
def toXhtml(n: Node, stripComment: Boolean, convertAmp: Boolean): String = {
val sb = new StringBuilder()
toXhtml(n, TopScope, sb, stripComment, convertAmp)
sb.toString()
}
While Scala 2.8 blessed the community with default args.
def toXhtml(node: Node): String = sbToString(toXhtml(x = node, sb = _))
