Question

I’m trying to parse a multi line XML attribute in Java using the classic DOM. The parsing is working just fine. However, it’s destroying the line breaks so, when I render my parsed string, line breaks get replaced by simple spaces.

<string key="help_text" value="This is a multi line long
                               text. This should be parsed
                               and rendered in multiple lines" />

To get the attribute I’m using:

attributes.getNamedItem("value").getTextContent()

If I just pass a manually typed string to the render method using “\n”, the text gets drawn as intended.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I’ve used JDom for this on the past. It saves you a lot of trouble when decoding multilined attributes and really enhances XML parsing/writing on Java. JDom is also compatible with Android development and it’s really tiny (only one jar file).

https://github.com/hunterhacker/jdom