This flag determines if nodes with PCDATA (regular text) that consist only of whitespace characters are to be put in DOM tree. Often whitespace-only data is not significant for the application, and the cost of allocating and storing such nodes (both memory and speed-wise) can be significant. For example, after parsing XML string "<node> <a/> </node>", <node> element will have 3 children when parse_ws_pcdata is set (child with type node_pcdata and value=" ", child with type node_element and name "a", and another child with type node_pcdata and value=" "), and only 1 child when parse_ws_pcdata is not set. This flag is off by default. |