Groovy: keeping of CR/LF of attributes while serializing XMLSlurper - serialization

Question

I'm new with groovy (a few weeks of experience). Currently I'm trying to process some visual studio .vcproj files using groovy: replacing some paths, that will be found by a regexp patterns. This works fine for me.
To write the changes to the file, I'm using the
XmlUtil.serialize(slurper, writer)
method, where
def writer = new FileWriter(outputFile)
and
def slurper = new XmlSlurper(keepIgnorableWhitespace:true).parse(it)
This also works fine, except one thing.
In the original vcproj file each attribute is in a separate line, like:
<Configurations>
<Configuration
Name="Debug|Win32"
OutputDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
IntermediateDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
ConfigurationType="1"
InheritedPropertySheets="..\..\..\..\Test_Debug.vsprops"
CharacterSet="2"
>
but after calling the serialize() method of the XMLUtil class, the whole output is stored in one line:
<Configurations>
<Configuration Name="Debug|Win32" InheritedPropertySheets="..\..\..\..\Test_Debug.vsprops" OutputDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)" IntermediateDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)" ConfigurationType="1" CharacterSet="2">
for the XMS parser this should be not a problem, but in the postprocessing some perl scripts use this vcproj file and they complain about missing CR/LF within the attribute line.
So is there any easy possibility to configure the XMLslurper or the serialize-class to keep the CR/LF in between of each attributes?

Answer 1

I doubt there is any easy way to format groovy's xml output to that level. Since the output is a valid XML, can't you use somekind of perl XML parser?
Other than that, you can try to match the attributes with a regex and add a line break to them. A very ugly hack:
import groovy.xml.XmlUtil
def original = '''<Configurations>
<Configuration
Name="Debug|Win32"
OutputDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
IntermediateDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
ConfigurationType="1"
InheritedPropertySheets="..\\..\\..\\..\\Test_Debug.vsprops"
CharacterSet="2"
>
</Configuration>
</Configurations>
'''
parsed = new XmlParser().parseText original
println XmlUtil.serialize(parsed).replaceAll(/[a-zA-Z]*="[^\"]*"/) {
"\n" + it
}
will print:
<?xml
version="1.0"
encoding="UTF-8"?><Configurations>
<Configuration
Name="Debug|Win32"
OutputDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
IntermediateDirectory="$(ConfigurationName)"
ConfigurationType="1"
InheritedPropertySheets="..\..\..\..\Test_Debug.vsprops"
CharacterSet="2"/>
</Configurations>