getNodeName() operation on an XML node returns #text

Question

<person>
<firstname>
<lastname>
<salary>
</person>

This is the XML I am parsing. When I try printing the node names of child elements of person, I get

text

firstname

text

lastname

text

salary

How do I eliminate #text being generated?

Update - Here is my code

try {

    NodeList nl = null;
    int l, i = 0;
    File fXmlFile = new File("file.xml");
    DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
    dbFactory.setValidating(false);
    dbFactory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);
    dbFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
    dbFactory.setIgnoringComments(true);

    dbFactory.setCoalescing(true);


    InputStream in;
    in = new FileInputStream(fXmlFile);
    Document doc = dBuilder.parse(in);
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
    Node n = doc.getDocumentElement();

    System.out.println(dbFactory.isIgnoringElementContentWhitespace());
    System.out.println(n);

    if (n != null && n.hasChildNodes()) {
        nl = n.getChildNodes();

        for (i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {
            System.out.println(nl.item(i).getNodeName());
        }
    }
} catch (Exception e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Solution

setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace only works if you use setValidating(true), and then only if the XML file you are parsing references a DTD that the parser can use to work out which whitespace-only text nodes are actually ignorable. If your document doesn't have a DTD it errs on the safe side and assumes that no text nodes can be ignored, so you'll have to write your own code to ignore them as you traverse the child nodes.

Comments

[coder]

Thank you very much for your response. Which method is preferable? Writing a DTD or writing a method to ignore white spaces?

[Ian Roberts]

It's not hard to strip out whitespace-only text nodes post-hoc (e.g. java.net/node/667186#comment-684625) and this avoids the need to modify the original XML file to add the DTD reference.

[coder]

This is awesome! Thanks a lot!

[Ian Roberts]

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