Java XMLStreamReader, how to get element text when text contains START_ELEMENT

Question

If I have an XML element such as:

<title>this is a title</title>

The text is very easy to get using XMLStreamReader.getElementText(). However, if I run into an element like this, I cannot figure out how to get the text:

<title>this is a <othertag>title with another</othertag> tag inside of it</title>

I wasn't even sure if that was valid XML, but it seems to pass the W3C validator I tried it on. According to the API docs, you can't use getElementText() to get the text if you are going to encounter another START_ELEMENT event inside. So... what can you use?

Maegan

Answer 1

Use getText

getText() returns the current value of the parse event as a string, this returns the string value of a CHARACTERS event, returns the value of a COMMENT, the replacement value for an ENTITY_REFERENCE, the string value of a CDATA section, the string value for a SPACE event, or the String value of the internal subset of the DTD. If an ENTITY_REFERENCE has been resolved, any character data will be reported as CHARACTERS events.

It

Thanks! This should have been obvious but my brain was fried after about 16 hours of coding nonstop. – Maegan

Answer 2

I think you need to parse the elements inside the <title> tag separately (as this is a and then the <othertag>...</...> section followed by tag inside of it

Pamphylia