Parsing XML comments with DOM

Question

I need to parse XML Tags which are commented out like

<DataType Name="SecureCode" Size="4" Type="NVARCHAR">
    <!-- <Validation>
            <Regex JavaPattern="^[0-9]*$" JSPattern="^[0-9]*$"/>
    </Validation> -->
    <UIType Size="4" UITableSize="4"/>
</DataType>

But all I found was setIgnoringComments(boolean)

Document doc = docBuilder.parse(new File(PathChecker.getDataTypesFile()));
docFactory.setIgnoringComments(true); // ture or false, no difference

But it doesn't seem to change anything. Is there any other way to parse this comments? I have to use DOM.

Regards

Possible duplicate of : stackoverflow.com/questions/12069509/… — Ankur Shanbhag
– Ankur Shanbhag, Commented Nov 15, 2013 at 8:28
It appears that setIgnoringComments() has a bug, it has been reported, but no fix has been made in all these years: issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XERCESJ-37 — Miguel Pardal
– Miguel Pardal, Commented Mar 11, 2018 at 1:18

pasha701 · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-15 08:53:39Z

5

Method "setIgnoringComments" removed comments from DOM tree during parsing. With "setIgnoringComments(false)" you can get comment text like:

    NodeList nl = doc.getDocumentElement().getChildNodes();
    for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {
        if (nl.item(i).getNodeType() == Element.COMMENT_NODE) {
            Comment comment=(Comment) nl.item(i);
            System.out.println(comment.getData());
        }
    }

answered Nov 15, 2013 at 8:53

pasha701

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2 Comments

Michael Brenndoerfer Over a year ago

Oh that's cool. Didn't tried it but that should solve it. Thanks

Sharad esdee Dutta Over a year ago

This will not pick single-line comments.

Michael Brenndoerfer · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-15 08:46:26Z

0

Since there seems not to exist a "regular way" of solving the problem I've just removed the comments.

BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(new File(PathChecker.getDataTypesFile())));
BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(new File(PathChecker.getDataTypesFileWithoutComments())));

String line = "";

while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
    line = line.replace("<!--", "").replace("-->", "") + "\n";
    bw.write(line);
}

answered Nov 15, 2013 at 8:46

Michael Brenndoerfer

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