Is there a more elegant way to convert an XML Document to a String in Java than this code?

Question

Here is the code currently used.

public String getStringFromDoc(org.w3c.dom.Document doc)    {
        try
        {
           DOMSource domSource = new DOM         


        

Answer 1

This is a little more concise:

try {
    Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
    StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new StringWriter());
    DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
    transformer.transform(source, result);
    return result.getWriter().toString();
} catch(TransformerException ex) {
    ex.printStackTrace();
    return null;
}

Otherwise you could use a library like XMLSerializer from Apache:

//Serialize DOM
OutputFormat format    = new OutputFormat (doc); 
// as a String
StringWriter stringOut = new StringWriter ();    
XMLSerializer serial   = new XMLSerializer (stringOut,format);
serial.serialize(doc);
// Display the XML
System.out.println(stringOut.toString());