stax - get xml node as string

Question

xml looks like so:

   
      ...stuff...
   
   
              


        

Answer 1

Stax is a low-level access API, and it does not have either lookups or methods that access content recursively. But what you actually trying to do? And why are you considering Stax?

Beyond using a tree model (DOM, XOM, JDOM, Dom4j), which would work well with XPath, best choice when dealing with data is usually data binding library like JAXB. With it you can pass Stax or SAX reader and ask it to bind xml data into Java beans and instead of messing with xml process Java objects. This is often more convenient, and it is usually quite performance. Only trick with larger files is that you do not want to bind the whole thing at once, but rather bind each sub-tree (in your case, one 'statement' at a time). This is easiest done by iterating Stax XmlStreamReader, then using JAXB to bind.