Normalization in DOM parsing with java - how does it work?

Question

I saw the line below in code for a DOM parser at this tutorial.

doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

Why do we do this normalization ?

Answer 1

The rest of the sentence is:

where only structure (e.g., elements, comments, processing instructions, CDATA sections, and entity references) separates Text nodes, i.e., there are neither adjacent Text nodes nor empty Text nodes.

This basically means that the following XML element

hello 
wor
ld

could be represented like this in a denormalized node:

Element foo
    Text node: ""
    Text node: "Hello "
    Text node: "wor"
    Text node: "ld"

When normalized, the node will look like this

Element foo
    Text node: "Hello world"

And the same goes for attributes: , comments, etc.