dom4j cdata (keep whitespace)

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to get cdata text from a node using dom4j java. My issue here is that all of the line breaks are removed. Essentially, I need to read the contents of the CDATA as if it were a <pre> tag in HTML.

Do you have any ideas? I have a very small time to get this done unfortunately so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you need XML text to be statically defined as in a CDATA block, it must be flagged this way in the XML as such:

<tag><![CDATA[This is
three
lines]]></tag>

If your contents is not inside a CDATA section, i.e.:

<tag>This is
three
lines</tag>

normal XML processing will occur which means that the whitespace is normalised.

Answer 2

Yup, the contents were fine. I figured out the error, it was a data issue.

dom4j automatically does NOT remove whitespace in cdata sections. I was reading in file contents from a buffered reader and used readLine and did not re-append line breaks, causing the entire xml document to be a 1-liner, causing my cdata section to be one line as well.

Sorry for not responding earlier, I had figured this out a couple of days ago...

Thanks!