Is there a more elegant way to convert an XML Document to a String in Java than this code?

Question

Here is the code currently used.

public String getStringFromDoc(org.w3c.dom.Document doc)    {         try         {            DOMSource domSource = new DOMSource(doc);            StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();            StreamResult result = new StreamResult(writer);            TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();            Transformer transformer = tf.newTransformer();            transformer.transform(domSource, result);            writer.flush();            return writer.toString();         }         catch(TransformerException ex)         {            ex.printStackTrace();            return null;         }     } 

Answer 1

Relies on DOM Level3 Load/Save:

public String getStringFromDoc(org.w3c.dom.Document doc)    {     DOMImplementationLS domImplementation = (DOMImplementationLS) doc.getImplementation();     LSSerializer lsSerializer = domImplementation.createLSSerializer();     return lsSerializer.writeToString(doc);    } 

Answer 2

The transformer API is the only XML-standard way to transform from a DOM object to a serialized form (String in this case). As standard I mean SUN Java XML API for XML Processing.

Other alternatives such as Xerces XMLSerializer or JDOM XMLOutputter are more direct methods (less code) but they are framework-specific.

In my opinion the way you have used is the most elegant and most portable of all. By using a standard XML Java API you can plug the XML-Parser or XML-Transformer of your choice without changing the code(the same as JDBC drivers). Is there anything more elegant than that?