Hi Christian,

thank you very much! So I had overlooked the option -w, which enables the preservation of whitespace-only text nodes. For practical purposes, I can now achieve what I need - an exact copy of a source fragment: using "-w -s indent=no".

Only one issue remains: the indentation does not honour "xml:space='preserve'".

Example:
Input:
<a xml:space="preserve"><b/></a>

Call:
basex -i input.xml -s indent=yes -q.

Result:
<a xml:space="preserve">
  <b/>
</a>

Cordial greetings,
Hans-Juergen