Formatting XML string?

[Brady Diggs]

Does anyone know a quick way to input a string of XML and format the text?
I've looked at the API (J2SE 6), but nothing looked useful. Seems like this
ought to have been done before...

Really all I'm trying to do is to wrap the lines in a JEditTextArea (a very early version
that doesn't have wrap functionality ). I just thought since it is XML, I could use
a formatter.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Rob Spoor]

JDOM has a "pretty" format you can get using Format.getPrettyFormat(). You can then use that in an XMLOutputter instance. The biggest drawback is, however, that it requires you to put the entire XML document into your memory as a org.jdom.Document. Check out JDOM's SAXBuilder for creating a Document from a file or other source.

[Paul Clapham]

Or if you want to stick to the standard Java API, then:

Transformer tx = // get an identity transformer
tx.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
tx.transform...

[Brady Diggs]

Both very good suggestions, fellows. Thanks.

Isn't there an easy way to break a String into lines
and then insert each line as a new line in a Document?
I can't append \n to break the lines. That's the rub.

[Rob Spoor]

Transformer and the JDOM formatter have no notion of strings and lines - they work on more abstract notions like documents, elements and attributes.

[Paul Clapham]

Brady Diggs wrote:Isn't there an easy way to break a String into lines
and then insert each line as a new line in a Document?

It wouldn't take more than about 10 lines of code to do either of the XML-based options already suggested. What's "not easy" about that?