Question

I’m writing unit tests for code which uses JDOM to read and write XML. I therefore need some way to compare the JDOM Element being produced by my code with a reference Element to ensure that they are equivalent (same name, namespace, and attributes, plus the same for its children, recursively).

Unfortunately, Element.equals only tests whether the elements are referentially equal. How can I best determine whether two elements represent identical trees?

Answer 1

The following should check to see if two XML element are equivalent:

String myElementString = XMLOutputter.outputString(myElement);
String testElementString = XMLOutputter.outputString(testElement);
boolean equals = myElementString.Equals(testElementString);