The size of the input xml also needs to be considered when choosing the solution. For large xmls, in the size of ~100k, possible if your input is from a web service, you also need to consider the garbage collection implications when you manipulate a large string. We used String.replaceAll before, and it caused frequent OOM in production with a 1.5G heap size because of the way replaceAll is implemented.
You can reference http://app-inf.blogspot.com/2013/04/pitfalls-of-handling-large-string.html for our findings.
I am not sure how XSLT deals with large String objects, but we ended up parsing the string manualy to remove prefixes in one parse to avoid creating additional large java objects.
public static String removePrefixes(String input1) {
String ret = null;
int strStart = 0;
boolean finished = false;
if (input1 != null) {
//BE CAREFUL : allocate enough size for StringBuffer to avoid expansion
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(input1.length());
while (!finished) {
int start = input1.indexOf('<', strStart);
int end = input1.indexOf('>', strStart);
if (start != -1 && end != -1) {
// Appending anything before '<', including '<'
sb.append(input1, strStart, start + 1);
String tag = input1.substring(start + 1, end);
if (tag.charAt(0) == '/') {
// Appending '/' if it is "</"
sb.append('/');
tag = tag.substring(1);
}
int colon = tag.indexOf(':');
int space = tag.indexOf(' ');
if (colon != -1 && (space == -1 || colon < space)) {
tag = tag.substring(colon + 1);
}
// Appending tag with prefix removed, and ">"
sb.append(tag).append('>');
strStart = end + 1;
} else {
finished = true;
}
}
//BE CAREFUL : use new String(sb) instead of sb.toString for large Strings
ret = new String(sb);
}
return ret;
}
