SOLUTION:

It turns out that the REXML pretty formatter has a "compact" flag that 
is undocumented, but does exactly what I want.

So this code...

require 'rexml/document'
require 'rexml/formatters/pretty'

....

  def write()
    formatter = REXML::Formatters::Pretty.new
    formatter.compact = true
    File.open("#{@file_path}", 'w') do |f|
      formatter.write(@document, f)
    end
  end

seems to work well (note the "formatter.compact = true" line).

Thanks,
Wes
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