XML: How to remove whitespaces from element's text?

[Berco]

When I invoke getNodeValue() on the sub-element of the following XML
document:

<item>
_{The text I'm interested in.}
</item>


the returned text includes many pre- and trailing whitespaces. Is there a
standard way to get rid of those whitespaces? I've tried:

DocumentBuilderFactory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);

But that doesn't seem to work.

Cheers,
Berco