Retrieved a String from ServletRequest by using getParameter("somename"). How can I turn it back into the XML that it is?

Question

I'm parsing a ServletRequest object(well, a HttpServletRequest really) Have 2 parameters there, one of them I know to have a value which is an XML file.

How can I retrieve that XML as Doc or byte[] or similar, rather than String?

Answer 1

• You can convert String to byte[] easily enough using its getBytes() function.

• If you want a Doc, you'll have to parse it. To do that, you can get a DocumentBuilder from DocumentBuilderFactory and let that parse() a ByteArrayOutputStream wrapped around that byte array.

Answer 2

If you have a string which contains XML, you can parse that into a Document by parsing from a StringReader which wraps the String. Don't convert the String to bytes unless you can deal with the potential encoding issues.

builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(theString))