javaxmlxpathxom

Java How to extract a complete XML block


Using this XML example:

<A>
  <B>
    <id>0</id>
  </B>
  <B>
    <id>1</id>
  </B>
</A>

I want a simple method to extract the XML block of node B, returning the XML String:

<B>
  <id>1</id>
</B>

To retrieve this node i should use some Java XPath library like XOM or Java XPath, but i couldn't find how to get the complete XML string.

I found two equivalent answered questions using C#: C# How to extract complete xml node set and how can I extract an XML block from an XML document?


Solution

  • Adding to lwburk's solution, to convert a DOM Node to string form, you can use a Transformer:

    private static String nodeToString(Node node)
    throws TransformerException
    {
        StringWriter buf = new StringWriter();
        Transformer xform = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
        xform.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "yes");
        xform.transform(new DOMSource(node), new StreamResult(buf));
        return(buf.toString());
    }
    

    Complete example:

    public static void main(String... args)
    throws Exception
    {
        String xml = "<A><B><id>0</id></B><B><id>1</id></B></A>";
        DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        Document doc = dbf.newDocumentBuilder().parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
    
        XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
        Node result = (Node)xPath.evaluate("A/B[id = '1']", doc, XPathConstants.NODE);
    
        System.out.println(nodeToString(result));
    }
    
    private static String nodeToString(Node node)
    throws TransformerException
    {
        StringWriter buf = new StringWriter();
        Transformer xform = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
        xform.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "yes");
        xform.transform(new DOMSource(node), new StreamResult(buf));
        return(buf.toString());
    }