[Po4a-devel] CR-LF characters in docbook (and xml in general)

Hello I have a problem with parsing message strings in docbook para elements. Many authors present the text in these elements in multiple lines eg. <para>This is a long paragraph which spans multiple lines. I would like it to be presented as a po message string to be translated</para> This is handled perfectly well by po4a-gettextize for most cases. Unfortunately some authors are using editors which represent the newline as a \r\n sequence instead of just \n. The proper behaviour of an xml parser according to the spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-line-ends) is to simply swallow those redundant \r characters. Unfortunately the po4a tools are passing them through to the po files which is confusing for the translator when using tools like pootle. The translator doesn't know whether the \r characters are required, whether they are significant etc. I am not sure exactly how the XML module is working, but would it be a complicated fix to request that the module processes the XML by swallowing the \r characters as per the spec? It is not critical as it is certainly simple enough to pre-process the input files with tr or something similar, but it would be nice (and make the workflow easier) if the xml parser did this by default. Regards Bob