REXML::Formatters::Transitive not found.

Hi:

I tried to use REXML::Formatters::Transitive in my code, but it wasn't found in the package.

Here is the output of irb:

eric@trig:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require "rexml"
=> true
irb(main):002:0> REXML::Formatters::Transitive
(irb):2:in `<main>': uninitialized constant REXML::Formatters::Transitive (NameError)
        from /home/eric/.rbenv/versions/3.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/3.1.0/gems/irb-1.4.1/exe/irb:11:in `<top (required)>'                                                                                                       
        from /home/eric/.rbenv/versions/3.1.6/bin/irb:25:in `load'                                        
        from /home/eric/.rbenv/versions/3.1.6/bin/irb:25:in `<main>'                                      
irb(main):003:0> 
^C                                                                                                        
irb(main):003:0> 

I tried using the code from github, Transitive.rb, but the output was bad. All the tags were broken onto two lines.

However, I had great success with subclassing Pretty.rb, and outputting the text nodes without formatting which is the result that I wanted. I would suggest making this Formatter:

class PrettyPreserveText < REXML::Formatters::Pretty
  def write_text( node, output )
    output << node.to_s()
  end
end

This is a great result. It has all the benefits of Pretty.rb while preserving long text nodes. It seems like a good idea to preserve text nodes "as-is." In fact, I would suggest changing the Pretty formater to output the unaltered text. When I used Pretty, it worked great except that it would indent every line of a long text string to make it look good. This obviously is rarely a good idea. The users need to be able to control the content of text strings. That's not the job of a formatter.

Thanks for all your work.

Eric

Start by reading Transitive.rb and Pretty.rb to compare the available formatter behavior and how text nodes are handled. Check how REXML exposes formatters, then determine the expected behavior for preserving long text nodes and confirm it with focused coverage before considering the issue done.