Bad design! you got that right! For years I have been dealing with a client who got stuck with this design.
A CDATA section is used to hide a complete XML document text - to work with it I have to extract the entire CDATA section to a
String, build an org.xml.sax.InputSource from the String and parse that to a DOM.
Then of course all of the normal org.w3c.dom and related methods work to access values.
Bill