Cloning dom.Document object

Question

My purpose is to read xml file into Dom object, edit the dom object, which involves removing some nodes.

After this is done i wish to restore the Dom to its original state without actually parsing the XML file.

Is there anyway i can clone the dom object i obtained after parsing the xml file for the first time. the idea is to avoid reading and parsing xml all the time, just keep a copy of original dom tree.

Answer 1

You could use importNode API on org.w3c.dom.Document:

Node copy = document.importNode(node, true);

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Full Example

import java.io.File;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();

        Document originalDocument = db.parse(new File("input.xml"));
        Node originalRoot = originalDocument.getDocumentElement();

        Document copiedDocument = db.newDocument();
        Node copiedRoot = copiedDocument.importNode(originalRoot, true);
        copiedDocument.appendChild(copiedRoot);

    }
}