How to ignore whitespace while reading a file to produce an XML DOM

Question

Hello, I'm trying to read a file to produce a DOM Document, but the file has whitespace and newlines and I'm trying to ignore them, but I couldn't:

DocumentBuilderFactory docfactory=DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
docfactory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);

I see in Javadoc that setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace method operates only when the validating flag is enabled, but I haven't the DTD or XML Schema for the document.

What can I do?

Update

I don't like the idea of introduce mySelf < !ELEMENT... declarations and i have tried the solution proposed in the forum pointed by Tomalak, but it doesn't work, i have used java 1.6 in an linux environment. I think if no more is proposed i will make a few methods to ignore whitespace text nodes

Answer 1

On a Sun support forum, someone asked the same question, way back in 2004.

A person named "cayhorstmann" seems to have managed to maneuver around that, maybe his posting helps you.

Answer 2

‘IgnoringElementContentWhitespace’ is not about removing all pure-whitespace text nodes, only whitespace nodes whose parents are described in the schema as having ELEMENT content — that is to say, they only contain other elements and never text.

If you don't have a schema (DTD or XSD) in use, element content defaults to MIXED, so this parameter will never have any effect. (Unless the parser provides a non-standard DOM extension to treat all unknown elements as containing ELEMENT content, which as far as I know the ones available for Java do not.)

You could hack the document on the way into the parser to include the schema information, for example by adding an internal subset to the < !DOCTYPE ... [...] > declaration containing < !ELEMENT ... > declarations, then use the IgnoringElementContentWhitespace parameter.

Or, possibly easier, you could just strip out the whitespace nodes, either in a post-process, or as they come in using an LSParserFilter.