Difference between setTextContent() and appendChild(Text)

Question

When creating a XML document what is the difference (if there is any) between these two methods of adding text to an element:

Element el = document.createElement("element");
el.setTextContent("This is the text content");

and

Element el = document.createElement("element");
Text txt = document.createTextNode("This is the text content");
el.appendChild(txt);

Answer 1

From the documentation for Element#setTextContent():

On setting, any possible children this node may have are removed and, if it the new string is not empty or null, replaced by a single Text node containing the string this attribute is set to.

Element#appendChild() does not remove existing children (except in the case that the specified child is already in the tree). Therefore

el.setTextContent("This is the text content")

is equivalent to removing all children before calling el.appendChild():

for(Node n : el.getChildNodes())
{
    el.removeChild(n);
}
el.appendChild(document.createTextNode("This is the text content"));

Answer 2

appendChild()

method adds a node after the last child node of the specified element node.

setTextContent()

Replace the text content by this one.