How to pretty print XML from Java?

Question

I have a Java String that contains XML, with no line feeds or indentations. I would like to turn it into a String with nicely formatted XML. How do I do this?

Answer 1

I have found that in Java 1.6.0_32 the normal method to pretty print an XML string (using a Transformer with a null or identity xslt) does not behave as I would like if tags are merely separated by whitespace, as opposed to having no separating text. I tried using in my template to no avail. The simplest solution I found was to strip the space the way I wanted using a SAXSource and XML filter. Since my solution was for logging I also extended this to work with incomplete XML fragments. Note the normal method seems to work fine if you use a DOMSource but I did not want to use this because of the incompleteness and memory overhead.

public static class WhitespaceIgnoreFilter extends XMLFilterImpl
{

    @Override
    public void ignorableWhitespace(char[] arg0,
                                    int arg1,
                                    int arg2) throws SAXException
    {
        //Ignore it then...
    }

    @Override
    public void characters( char[] ch,
                            int start,
                            int length) throws SAXException
    {
        if (!new String(ch, start, length).trim().equals("")) 
               super.characters(ch, start, length); 
    }
}

public static String prettyXML(String logMsg, boolean allowBadlyFormedFragments) throws SAXException, IOException, TransformerException
    {
        TransformerFactory transFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
        transFactory.setAttribute("indent-number", new Integer(2));
        Transformer transformer = transFactory.newTransformer();
        transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
        transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "4");
        StringWriter out = new StringWriter();
        XMLReader masterParser = SAXHelper.getSAXParser(true);
        XMLFilter parser = new WhitespaceIgnoreFilter();
        parser.setParent(masterParser);

        if(allowBadlyFormedFragments)
        {
            transformer.setErrorListener(new ErrorListener()
            {
                @Override
                public void warning(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException
                {
                }

                @Override
                public void fatalError(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException
                {
                }

                @Override
                public void error(TransformerException exception) throws TransformerException
                {
                }
            });
        }

        try
        {
            transformer.transform(new SAXSource(parser, new InputSource(new StringReader(logMsg))), new StreamResult(out));
        }
        catch (TransformerException e)
        {
            if(e.getCause() != null && e.getCause() instanceof SAXParseException)
            {
                if(!allowBadlyFormedFragments || !"XML document structures must start and end within the same entity.".equals(e.getCause().getMessage()))
                {
                    throw e;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                throw e;
            }
        }
        out.flush();
        return out.toString();
    }