Why are there #text nodes in my xml file?

Question

I'm making an android application that does DOM parsing on an xml file. I have an xml file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<family>
    <grandparent>
        <parent1>
            <child1>Foo</child1>
            <child2>Bar</child2>
        </parent1>
        <parent2>
            <child1>Raz</child1>
            <child2>Mataz</child2>
        </parent2>
    </grandparent>  
</family>

If I run a dom parser on it, like this:

try {
    DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
        
    Document doc = builder.parse(input);
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();   //added in since the edit
    NodeList nodd = doc.getElementsByTagName("grandparent");
    for (int x = 0; x < nodd.getLength(); x++){
        Node node = nodd.item(x);
        NodeList nodes = node.getChildNodes();
        for(int y = 0; y < nodes.getLength(); y++){
            Node n = nodes.item(y);
            System.out.println(n.getNodeName());
        }
    }
}

My application prints out the following

07-20 18:24:28.395: INFO/System.out(491): #text

07-20 18:24:28.395: INFO/System.out(491): parent1

07-20 18:24:28.395: INFO/System.out(491): #text

07-20 18:24:28.395: INFO/System.out(491): parent2

07-20 18:24:28.395: INFO/System.out(491): #text

My question is, what are those #text fields and more importantly, how do I get rid of them?

Edit: So now that I know what they are, I tried to normalize it. I have updated the code to reflect the changes, but same result.

Answer 1

It's whitespace (newlines, spaces, tabs) :)