How to get node contents from JDOM

Question

I'm writing an application in java using import org.jdom.*;

My XML is valid,but sometimes it contains HTML tags. For example, something like this:

  <program-title>Anatomy &amp; Physiology</program-title>
  <overview>
       <content>
              For more info click <a href="page.html">here</a>
              <p>Learn more about the human body.  Choose from a variety of Physiology (A&amp;P) designed for complementary therapies.&amp;#160; Online studies options are available.</p>
       </content>
  </overview>
  <key-information>
     <category>Health &amp; Human Services</category>

So my problem is with the < p > tags inside the overview.content node.

I was hoping that this code would work :

        Element overview = sds.getChild("overview");
        Element content = overview.getChild("content");

        System.out.println(content.getText());

but it returns blank.

How do I return all the text ( nested tags and all ) from the overview.content node ?

Thanks

Answer 1

content.getText() gives immediate text which is only useful fine with the leaf elements with text content.

Trick is to use org.jdom.output.XMLOutputter ( with text mode CompactFormat )

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();
    String xmlFileName = "a.xml";
    Document doc = builder.build(xmlFileName);

    Element root = doc.getRootElement();
    Element overview = root.getChild("overview");
    Element content = overview.getChild("content");

    XMLOutputter outp = new XMLOutputter();

    outp.setFormat(Format.getCompactFormat());
    //outp.setFormat(Format.getRawFormat());
    //outp.setFormat(Format.getPrettyFormat());
    //outp.getFormat().setTextMode(Format.TextMode.PRESERVE);

    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
    outp.output(content.getContent(), sw);
    StringBuffer sb = sw.getBuffer();
    System.out.println(sb.toString());
}

Output

For more info click<a href="page.html">here</a><p>Learn more about the human body. Choose from a variety of Physiology (A&amp;P) designed for complementary therapies.&amp;#160; Online studies options are available.</p>

Do explore other formatting options and modify above code to your need.

"Class to encapsulate XMLOutputter format options. Typical users can use the standard format configurations obtained by getRawFormat() (no whitespace changes), getPrettyFormat() (whitespace beautification), and getCompactFormat() (whitespace normalization). "