Can you preserve leading and trailing whitespace in XML?

Question

How does one tell the XML parser to honor leading and trailing whitespace?

Dim xml: Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
xml.async = False
xml.loadxml "<xml>1 2</xml>"
wscript.echo len(xml.documentelement.text)

Above prints out 3.

Dim xml: Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
xml.async = False
xml.loadxml "<xml> 2</xml>"
wscript.echo len(xml.documentelement.text)

Above prints out 1. (I'd like it to print 2).

Is there something special I can put in the xml document itself to tell the parser to keep leading and trailing whitespace in the document?

CLARIFICATION 1: Is there an attribute that can be specificed ONCE at the beginning of the document to apply to all elements?

CLARIFICATION 2: Because the contents of the entities may have unicode data, but the xml file needs to be plain ascii, all entities are encoded -- meaning CDATA's unfortunately are not available.

Answer 1

As I commented, all answers recommending the usage of the xml:space="preserve" are wrong.

The xml:space attribute can only be used to control the treatment of whitespace-only nodes, that is text nodes composed entirely of whitespace characters.

This is not at all the case with the current problem.

In fact, the code provided below correctly obtains a length of 2 for the text node contained in:

<xml> 2</xml>

Here is the VB code that correctly gets the length of the text node (do not forget to add a reference to "Microsoft XML, v 3.0"):

Dim xml As MSXML2.DOMDocument
Private Sub Form_Load()
Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")
xml.async = False
xml.loadxml "<xml> 2</xml>"
Dim n
n = Len(xml.documentelement.selectSingleNode("text()").nodeValue)
wscript.echo Len(n)
End Sub

If you put a breakpoint on the line:

wscript.echo Len(n)

you'll see that when the debugger breaks there, the value of n is 2, as it is required.

Therefore, this code is the solution that was being sought.