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I'm retrieving a String value from a database that is in XML format an example of the String:

<TXNURN>3505</TXNURN><CH></CH><REQ>N</REQ><DOB></DOB><QT>2</QT><DR>TAGER00</DR><NUMBER>N</NUMBER>

In the webpage it is displayed like this(since of course XML tags are invisible in HTML page):

3505N2TAGER00N

What I would like to do, is create a java class/function that will take the String, and format it so that the output on the HTML page would look something like this:

TXNURN:     3505
CH:
REQ:        N
DOB:
QT:         2
DR:         TAGER00
NUMBER:     N

I know there are plenty of methods that can format Strings and characters, but I just can't seem to wrap my head around on how to use them effectively in getting the result that I want. I don't ever have to format Strings you see...

Any help would greatly be appreciated! Thanks in advance.

---------------------------------------------------------- Update ---------------------------------------------------------------

I see now that all I realy have to do is put a line feed after every closing tag . But the question remains... How?

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1 Answer 1

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2

there're 2 common APIs for working with XML built-in to the JRE - DOM and SAX.

here's a quick and dirty hack to do something like what you requested using SAX:

public class Main {
private final static String input = "<TXNURN>3505</TXNURN><CH></CH><REQ>N</REQ><DOB></DOB><QT>2</QT><DR>TAGER00</DR><NUMBER>N</NUMBER>";

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    SAXParser parser = SAXParserFactory.newInstance().newSAXParser();
    final StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
    parser.parse(new StringBufferInputStream("<root>"+input+"</root>"), new DefaultHandler() {
        @Override
        public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {
            if ("root".equals(qName)) return;
            output.append(qName).append(":");
        }

        @Override
        public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName) throws SAXException {
            if ("root".equals(qName)) return;
            output.append("\n");
        }

        @Override
        public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) throws SAXException {
            output.append(" ").append(ch, start, length);
        }
    });

    System.out.println(output.toString());
}

i've used a deprecated (and for a good reason!) method for getting an input stream from a string for brevity, and you'll probably want to produce HTML (otherwise this would be rendered in one line as HTML ignored formatting), but i hope you get the general picture

edit: there's probably a shorter fancier way to do this using an XSLT transform to convert your XML into HTML (which is xml for what you want). too bad i dont know how to whip up something like that quick enough

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