stax - get xml node as string

Question

xml looks like so:

   
      ...stuff...
   
   
              


        

Answer 1

I had a similar task and although the original question is older than a year, I couldn't find a satisfying answer. The most interesting answer up to now was Blaise Doughan's answer, but I couldn't get it running on the XML I am expecting (maybe some parameters for the underlying parser could change that?). Here the XML, very simplyfied:

    
        ...
        
Lorem ipsum...
        Devils inside...
        ...
    

My solution:

public static String readElementBody(XMLEventReader eventReader)
    throws XMLStreamException {
    StringWriter buf = new StringWriter(1024);

    int depth = 0;
    while (eventReader.hasNext()) {
        // peek event
        XMLEvent xmlEvent = eventReader.peek();

        if (xmlEvent.isStartElement()) {
            ++depth;
        }
        else if (xmlEvent.isEndElement()) {
            --depth;

            // reached END_ELEMENT tag?
            // break loop, leave event in stream
            if (depth < 0)
                break;
        }

        // consume event
        xmlEvent = eventReader.nextEvent();

        // print out event
        xmlEvent.writeAsEncodedUnicode(buf);
    }

    return buf.getBuffer().toString();
}

Usage example:

XMLEventReader eventReader = ...;
while (eventReader.hasNext()) {
    XMLEvent xmlEvent = eventReader.nextEvent();
    if (xmlEvent.isStartElement()) {
        StartElement elem = xmlEvent.asStartElement();
        String name = elem.getName().getLocalPart();

        if ("DESCRIPTION".equals(name)) {
            String xmlFragment = readElementBody(eventReader);
            // do something with it...
            System.out.println("'" + fragment + "'");
        }
    }
    else if (xmlEvent.isEndElement()) {
        // ...
    }
}

Note that the extracted XML fragment will contain the complete extracted body content, including white space and comments. Filtering those on demand, or making the buffer size parametrizable have been left out for code brevity:

'
    
        ...
        
Lorem ipsum...
        Devils inside...
        ...
    
    '