Dear Ottid,
Thanks for providing us with the helpful example, which helped me to understand the problem.
replace /a <root xml:space="preserve"><a><b>foo</b></a> bar</root>
"a.xml" (Line 1): Open quote is expected for attribute "xml:space" associated with an element type "root".
Just a side note: Command-line parsing is restrictive when it comes to replacing XML. The reason is that is possible to send multiple commands in a single line, as shown in the following example:
create db db; replace /a <a/>; xquery .
xquery /root
<root><a><b>foo</b></a> bar</root>
You may be surprised to hear that whitespaces in your document were actually chopped, and that the whitespaces are added by the serializer, because the "indent" serialization parameter is by default set to "yes".
It was surprised to see that no one else pointed at this so far, and that was not mentioned in our documentation, so I have just added some explanatory lines [1,2].
Some more technical background:
If you call BaseX the "info storage" command, you will see which XML nodes are stored in the document:
set chop on;create db db <a> </a>; info storage
CHOP: true Database 'db' created in 11.0 ms. PRE DIS SIZ ATS ID NS KIND CONTENT ----------------------------------------- 0 1 2 1 0 0 DOC db.xml 1 1 1 1 1 0 ELEM aIf
set chop off;create db db <a> </a>; info storage
CHOP: false Database 'db' created in 20.12 ms. PRE DIS SIZ ATS ID NS KIND CONTENT ----------------------------------------- 0 1 3 1 0 0 DOC db.xml 1 1 2 1 1 0 ELEM a 2 1 1 1 2 0 TEXT
Serialization indentation was a chosen as default because it goes hand in hand with the CHOP option. It even works fine if CHOP is disabled if a document has whitespaces included (in which case no whitespaces will be added by the serialized). But it may definitely cause undesirable output if a document contains no superfluous whitespaces, such as in your case.
Hope this helps, Christian
[1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Options#CHOP [2] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Full-Text#Mixed_Content