Converting a string to DOM

[Andrew McLaren]

I am trying to convert a string into a DOMDocument. As far as I can tell, the string is valid XML. Here's the relevant block of code:

        
SAXReader reader = new SAXReader(st);
        DOMDocumentFactory factory = (DOMDocumentFactory)reader.getDocumentFactory();
        DOMDocument doc = (DOMDocument)factory.createDocument();  

It dies on the SAXReader line, although it isn't throwing a SAXException. Instead I get java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: plus the entire string I am trying to convert.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

[Ulf Dittmer]

It would be most useful to see the actual exception, particularly the name of the class that is not found.

[Paul Clapham]

SAXReader isn't in the standard Java API. I guess from my Google search you're asking about the class in DOM4J? What I found didn't have any documentation for this constructor

public SAXReader(String xmlReaderClassName)

but the name of the parameter does suggest you should be passing it a class name and not a String containing XML.

Okay, that's what you're doing wrong. How should you do it right? Based on the documentation I saw, I would try something like

SAXReader reader = new SAXReader();
Document doc = reader.read(new StringReader(yourXMLString));

but that's just a guess. If it were me I would be looking around the DOM4J documentation for some example code.

[Andrew McLaren]

Originally posted by Ulf Dittmer:
It would be most useful to see the actual exception, particularly the name of the class that is not found.

That's one of the (many!) things that's confusing me here. After the ClassNotFoundException, it gives returns the contents of the string I am passing into SAXReader, implying to me that it is looking for a class named the contents of the string.
But according to the JavaDocs for dom4j, that's a valid constructor.

[Andrew McLaren]

Originally posted by Paul Clapham:
SAXReader isn't in the standard Java API. I guess from my Google search you're asking about the class in DOM4J? What I found didn't have any documentation for this constructor

public SAXReader(String xmlReaderClassName)

but the name of the parameter does suggest you should be passing it a class name and not a String containing XML.

Okay, that's what you're doing wrong. How should you do it right? Based on the documentation I saw, I would try something like

SAXReader reader = new SAXReader();
Document doc = reader.read(new StringReader(yourXMLString));

but that's just a guess. If it were me I would be looking around the DOM4J documentation for some example code.

Aha! That gets me farther, at least. Now it's complaining about the markup not being well formed, but that I think I can handle.

Thanks much!

Andrew