Hi Miguel,
Hmmm, with 'readString ... "<this> </this>"' everything works fine, but with 'readString ... "<items><this> </this></items>"' it doesn't. Seems to be a bug in HXT.
I don't see the bug: ------------------------------------------ *Main> runX $ ( readString [(a_validate,v_0)] "<items><this> </this></items>" >>> setTraceLevel 4 >>> traceDoc "doc after reading" >>> setTraceLevel 0 >>> writeDocumentToString []) -- (1) doc after reading <items> <this/> </items> content of: "<items><this> </this></items>" =========================================== ---XTag "/" | "source"="\"<items><this> </this></items>\"" | "encoding"="UNICODE" | "transfer-URI"="string:" | "transfer-Message"="OK" | "transfer-Status"="200" | "transfer-Encoding"="UNICODE" | +---XTag "items" | +---XTag "this" | +---XText " " ["<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<items><this> </this></items>"] *Main> ----------------------------------------- the space remains there and not element with empty contents occurs Cheers, Uwe -- Web: http://www.fh-wedel.de/~si/