Database Software

Hello,

I am developing a trigger that splits a XML document into mulitple XML elements. The XML document is stored as XMLType column (CLOB) in Oracle 10g release 1 database, The root element of the document <bill> contains multiple child elements <section>.

I am looping through the XMLType document and using extract() function to otain the child elements <section> and other information to identify each <section>. Everything works fine except that XMLType.extract('/bill/section').getStringVal() automatically force pretty-print (inserting extra white spaces). I can delete multiple whitespaces using oracle regular expression, however this doesn't work 100% as <section> element contains other elements that are of mixed content model.

Is there anyway to turn off pretty-print when using extract() function? What's the alternative way of extracting elements from XMLType document using PL/SQL?

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.

Noreen