Java DOM processing XML Keeping Carriage Returns

[Dr. Laurence Leff]

I am writing a Java program to read in XML file, modify some elements slightly, and then write it out. That XML file is prepared in Docbook.

It works fine, except that it is disturbing the carriage returns in places where they have meaning.

Attached are a sample input file, the sample output file, and a simplified version of my Java program. My real file, examines certain element's attributes and adds certain elements to the DOM data structure.

How, best to write such a program, without disturbing the carriage returns between "<programlisting>" and "</programlisting>"

Here is the input file. I need to preserve the formatting of the material between "<programlisting>" and "</programlisting>"

<test>
<programlisting>
a
b
c d e f
</programlisting>
</test>

Here is the output file -- observe how the "a b c d e f" are now on one line. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <test> <programlisting> a b c d e f </programlisting> </test>

Here is the Java program:

import java.text.*;
import java.io.*;

import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import org.apache.xml.serialize.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import org.xml.sax.*;

public class Test {
static PrintWriter debug = null;
static Document document = null;
static String OutputFileName;

static Element CreateElement (String ElementName, String Contents){ Element ToReturn; ToReturn = document.createElement(ElementName); Text T = document.createTextNode(Contents); ToReturn.appendChild(T); return ToReturn; } static Element CreateElement (String ElementName, String Contents, String AttributeName, String AttributeValue){ Element ToReturn = CreateElement(ElementName,Contents); ToReturn.setAttribute(AttributeName,AttributeValue); return ToReturn; }

public static void main (String args) throws FileNotFoundException { try { debug = new PrintWriter (new FileWriter("debug.out")); } catch (Exception d) {System.out.println("cannot open debug file");} Text T; int j; DocumentBuilder parser = null; // Here we read in the data from the XML file DocumentBuilderFactory Factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance; String xmlFile = args[0]; File file = new File (xmlFile); try { parser = Factory.newDocumentBuilder; } catch (ParserConfigurationException pce) { System.out.println ("Parser Configuration Exception " + pce.getMessage); System.exit(0); } try { document = parser.parse(file); } catch (SAXException se) { System.out.println ("SAX Exception on parsing document " + se.getMessage); System.exit(0); } catch (IOException ioe) { System.out.println ("IO Exception on parsing document " + ioe.getMessage); System.exit(0); } FileWriter out = null; XMLSerializer X = null; Element root = null; OutputFileName=args[0]; try { out = new FileWriter(OutputFileName+".OUT"+".xml"); out.flush; OutputFormat o = new OutputFormat(document); o.setIndent(5); o.setIndenting(true); X = new XMLSerializer(o); X.setOutputCharStream(out); } catch (IOException e0) { System.out.println ("problem in setting up to save XML file" + e0.getMessage); e0.printStackTrace; }

// use the XML functions to dump the materials
try {
X.serialize(document);
out.flush;
} catch (IOException e2) {System.out.println("error writing file " + e2.getMessage);e2.printStackTrace;}

debug.close;

}
}

Dr. Laurence Leff Western Illinois University, Macomb IL 61455 ||(309) 298-1315 Stipes 447 Assoc. Prof. of Computer Sci. Pager: 309-367-0787 FAX: 309-298-2302
Secretary: eContracts Technical Committee OASIS Legal XML Member Section

 

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

/Dr. Laurence Leff/:

It works fine, except that it is disturbing the carriage returns in places where they have meaning.

... XML processor MUST behave as if it normalized all line breaks in external parsed entities (including the document entity) on input, before parsing, by translating both the two-character sequence #xD #xA and any #xD that is not followed by #xA to a single #xA character.

So you have to include the carriage returns in the source XML data using character references -

 

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

/Stanimir Stamenkov/:

So you have to include the carriage returns in the source XML data using character references -

 

[Dr. Laurence Leff]

Dr. Stamenkov:

Thank you for your quick responses to my question on using Java to process XML files that contain formatted text such as programs.

I tried your suggestion of using the entity reference for carriage return,

 

[Stanimir Stamenkov]

/Dr. Laurence Leff/:

I tried your suggestion of using the entity reference for carriage return,