looking for a creative way to get a string from file.xml

[Adrian Burlington]

Can anyone think on a creative solution for this: I'm trying to output the content of an XML file on the a JTextArea but I wish the format to be neatly like in the pic below (with indentation).

I tried StringTokenizer / matcher pattern but the result are far from desired.

Thanks!

Currently I have the below in one long line (String)

[Jesper de Jong]

I just see a broken image icon, no image...

[Rob Spoor]

That's hotlink prevention in action. The image URL is http://postimage.org/image/1gnszfq9w/

The easy way to do this is using a third party library. JDOM has classes XMLOutputter and Format; the latter has static method getPrettyFormat() which returns a Format that adds proper indentation etc. XMLOutputter can output to any Writer, so that includes StringWriter.
A short piece of code:

Document document = new SAXBuilder().build(new File(myFile.xml));
XMLOutputter outputter = new XMLOutputter(Format.getPrettyFormat());
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
outputter.output(document, writer);
textArea.setText(writer.toString());

An alternative is go the hard way:
- maintain the indentation yourself
- when you encounter an element start tag, increase the indentation
- when you encounter an element end tag, decrease the indentation

The latter technique has the advantage that your not limited to a DOM solution, where the entire document is stored in memory. You could also use it for a SAX or StAX solution where you only get the latest element / attributes / text.

[Adrian Burlington]

Hi Rob,

THANKS!!!

[Rob Spoor]

You're welcome.