Patent ID: 7496612

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for preserving integrity of data exchanged using Extensible Markup Language (“XML”), comprising: extracting an XML fragment from an XML document; ascertaining white space handling rules for the XML document associated with the XML fragment, wherein the white space handling rules are indicated in the XML document; discarding ignorable white space in the fragment, where ignorable white space is determined using said white space handling rules for the XML document; inserting the fragment into a SOAP (“Simple Object Access Protocol”) document; in the SOAP document, entitizing all remaining white space associated with the fragment by: determining each of at least one white space data fragments in the remaining white space; for each of the at least one white space data fragments, inserting XML tag syntax into the SOAP document associated with the white space data fragment to cause an XML parser to treat the white space data fragment as an entity and thereby avoid removing the white space data fragment during a parsing operation; and transmitting the SOAP document to a receiving device, wherein the receiving device includes an XML parser for normalizing content in the SOAP document, wherein the white space handling rule is an xml:space attribute set to “preserve” or “default”.