Hi Hans-Jürgen,
"Chops all leading and trailing whitespaces from text nodes while building a database, and discards empty text nodes. By default, this option is set to true, as it often reduces the database size by up to 50%. It can also be turned off on command line via -w."
The text states clearly that chopping affects only text nodes stored into a database.
Just another indication that we continuously need to improve our documentation (we are looking for volunteers!). The chop option (which is one of the features that we introduced at a very early stage, but are hard to get out again) also applies to the -i flag which I assume you used to specify the input. When using -w...
basex -wi input.xml .
<para>xxx <emphasis role="italic">abc</emphasis> yyy.</para>
...I get the correct result.
(Side remark: it would be a serious issue if the prolog option were required, as this would imply that standard conformant behaviour could only be achieved by making the code unportable.)
Side answer: The situation is not ideal, but BaseX-specific prolog options won't at least cause any compatbility issues, because the option declaration will simply be ignored by other processors.
How did you proceed? Christian