[basex-talk] Set strip whitespace mode

Dear BaseX folks, question: what is the recommended way of ensuring that an application calling BaseX via command-line (basex ...)  uses a certain strip whitespace mode (true or false), if the application is deployed on servers with different BaseX versions? Option -w cannot naively be used, as it toggles the strip whitespace mode, so the effect depends on the version. I have not found out how to determine the version of BaseX reliably, using XQuery or a command. So how can a script decide whether or not to use -w? Thank you for help. Kind regards,Hans-Jürgen