Writing to an XML File in Java

Question

I have an XML file of which I have an element as shown;

"<Event start="2011.12.12 13:45:00:0000" end="2011.12.12 13:47:00:0000" anon="89"/>"

I want to add another attribute "comment" and write it to this XML File giving;

"<Event start="2011.12.12 13:45:00:0000" end="2011.12.12 13:47:00:0000" anon="89" comment=""/>"

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks, Matt

There's a fully working example in my answer to another question: stackoverflow.com/a/9588830/898289 — Adam
– Adam, Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 12:37

Sunil Kumar B M · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-13 12:10:45Z

2

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);
Document document = factory.newDocumentBuilder().parse(xmlFile);

Element eventElement = (Element)document.getElementsByTagName("Event").item(0);
eventElement.setAttribute("comment", "");

FYI: I've use DOM framework here org.w3c.dom.*

answered Mar 13, 2012 at 12:10

Sunil Kumar B M

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Anantha Krishnan · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-13 12:11:14Z

0

Use setAttribute method to add attribute,

// Add an attribute
element.setAttribute("newAttrName", "attrValue");

Use the following method to write to XML file,

// This method writes a DOM document to a file
public static void writeXmlFile(Document doc, String filename) {
    try {
        // Prepare the DOM document for writing
        Source source = new DOMSource(doc);

        // Prepare the output file
        File file = new File(filename);
        Result result = new StreamResult(file);

        // Write the DOM document to the file
        Transformer xformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
        xformer.transform(source, result);
    } catch (TransformerConfigurationException e) {
    } catch (TransformerException e) {
    }
}

answered Mar 13, 2012 at 12:11

Anantha Krishnan

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1 Comment

user1224534 Over a year ago

Thanks for the help! :D It is now completed!

Mathias Schwarz · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-13 12:09:10Z

0

Parse the file, add the attribute and write it back to disk.

There is plenty of frameworks that can do this. The DOM framework in Java is probably the first thing you should look at.

answered Mar 13, 2012 at 12:09

Mathias Schwarz

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1 Comment

user1224534 Over a year ago

I have parsed all the elements of the xml file and I have tried to setAttribute("comment", ""). but it does nothing.

Howard Schutzman · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-13 16:28:28Z

0

Using DOM, as suggested in previous answers, is certainly reasonable for this particular problem, which is relatively simple.

However, I have found that JDOM is generally much easier to use when you want to parse and/or modify XML files. Its basic approach is to load the entire file into an easy to use data structure. This works well unless your XML file is very very large.

For more info go to http://www.jdom.org/

answered Mar 13, 2012 at 16:28

Howard Schutzman

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