How do I load an org.w3c.dom.Document from XML in a string?

Question

I have a complete XML document in a string and would like a Document object. Google turns up all sorts of garbage. What is the simplest solution? (In Java 1.5)<

Answer 1

Whoa there!

There's a potentially serious problem with this code, because it ignores the character encoding specified in the String (which is UTF-8 by default). When you call String.getBytes() the platform default encoding is used to encode Unicode characters to bytes. So, the parser may think it's getting UTF-8 data when in fact it's getting EBCDIC or something… not pretty!

Instead, use the parse method that takes an InputSource, which can be constructed with a Reader, like this:

import java.io.StringReader;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;
…
        return builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));

It may not seem like a big deal, but ignorance of character encoding issues leads to insidious code rot akin to y2k.