Preserve attribute order && Keep Tags minimized

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I have to automatically create a lot of JNDI environment variables like the following:

Now no matter what I do, Scala will always put the "name" attribute last, i.e. change attribute ordering and also expand my empty tag. I searched the mailing list for a solution to the expanding problem, but in Snapshot 2.8.0 there doesn't seem to be an easy one. The end result is this:

Now I'd love to have the attribute order preserved, as scanning variables (with my human eyes :) ) by the "name" attribute in a jndi config file is a very common thing to do. I can live with the tag expansion, even though it adds a bit of bloat and wonder why Scala expands my empty tag in the first place: I would write down the expanded version if I wanted to.

Thanks guys!

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Imported From: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-2735?orig=1
Reporter: behlma

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Steven Bethard (bethard) said:
I just found a particularly nasty example of where not keeping tags minimized causes real problems. If I insert a "
" element in a HTML page, Scala expands that to "

" which is interpreted as two line breaks, not one, in both Firefox and Chrome.

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Silvio Bierman (silviobierman) said:
I would love some information about the current state of this issue. My Scala world sort of revolves around XML documents, transforming XML into new XML or into HTML. I really need attribute ordering preservation desperately.

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Steven Bethard (bethard) said:
I wonder if anti-xml (http://anti-xml.org/) has a fix for this problem? That seems to be much more active than whoever maintains scala.xml and they're even looking into supporting scala XML literals:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/scala-internals/eoTgKU8MGo4/discussion

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Silvio Bierman (silviobierman) said:
Anti-xml does not look to strive to backward compatibility so for my current projects I am afraid it is not an option. Is the XML handling by the compiler (literals, matching) pluggable at all?

To be honest, although the API is a bit odd at places scala.xml suits most of my needs. If only this issue would be fixed I would be quite happy to keep using it.

If I had to guess I would think it would take little more than replacing a HashMap with a LinkedHashMap or something like that. Is this issue currently assigned to anyone at all?

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@khernyo said:
"Preserve attribute order" is done in current master. (scala/scala@126469f)

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Steven Bethard (bethard) said:
Those changes look a little odd, in particular that some asserts in the tests have been replaced by printlns.

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@khernyo said:
Those asserts were added by me a couple of days earlier when I didn't know about a nice partest feature. Printlns are better in this case because partest compares the output to the .check file and prints the difference if it doesn't match (this also means the test failed). It would be a bit more verbose to achieve the same using asserts.

So, the only real change in xml-attribute.scala is the last five lines.

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Steven Bethard (bethard) said:
I see. Makes sense. Thanks for explaining!

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@acruise said:
Was fixed in master a couple months ago, thanks Szabolcs! The change should ship in 2.10.

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David Portabella (dportabella) said:
"Preserve attribute order" is done in inline xml, but the following code does not preserve attribute order: xml.XML.save("out.xml", xml.XML.load("in.xml"))