option ignoreWhitespace

[eGavr]

Is it possible to make this option work in the same way as in node-htmlparser!?

[fb55]

It's hard to do this right when streaming. Also, I don't really see the point of it (the meaning of whitespace depends on the location in the document).

[eGavr]

In general, the idea of this option is to ignore spaces, tabs etc in those cases, when there are situated not in tag's attributes or in tag's content, but between tags.

For example, if these option is true

This code

<font>
    <br>this is the text
<font>

should be parsed as

<font><br>this is the text<font>

but now it is parsed as

<font> <br>this is the text <font> </font></font>

[fb55]

As an example why this is a bad idea:

<p>foo<b> <i>bar</i></b></p>

is usually rendered as

foo bar

but with the change you're proposing, it becomes

<p>foo<b><i>bar</i></b></p>

which is rendered as

foobar

(Note the missing whitespace.)

The current behavior of normalizing whitespace leads to problems in <pre>-tags, which is still bad enough, but won't blow up your document on a regular basis.