Formatting XML file using StAX

Question

I am using StAX XML stream writer to write the XML file. It writes all the data in a single line. I want all the tags to be indented instead of a single line.

Duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/290326/stax-xml-formatting-in-java — skaffman, Jun 01 '10 at 11:12
@skaffman: From that I am not able to understand how to set the indent parmeter and where I can pass my xml file name. — Anurag, Jun 01 '10 at 12:20

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 09 '11 at 10:23

9

stax-utils provides class IndentingXMLStreamWriter which does the job:

XMLStreamWriter writer =
  XMLOutputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamWriter(...);
writer = new IndentingXMLStreamWriter(writer);
...

edited Sep 09 '11 at 10:23

Barend

17,296
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answered Jun 01 '10 at 20:06

chris

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can you please name the jar file. I am not getting the download option at the given site. – Anurag Jun 02 '10 at 10:39
@Anurag - https://stax-utils.dev.java.net/files/documents/1519/50947/stax-utils-20070216.zip – chris Jun 03 '10 at 12:21
@Chris i tried this with spring batch. I get the xml in proper format, but when i deploy this to weblogic and run the batch job, i see " " inserted at the end of each line. How to avoid this? – Maverick Riz Apr 23 '15 at 21:47
@Maverick: Not sure... You may want to try [StAXON](https://github.com/beckchr/staxon) instead, which has a similar class (`de.odysseus.staxon.xml.util.PrettyXMLStreamWriter `). – chris Apr 30 '15 at 10:00

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

Answered here: StAX XML formatting in Java

EDIT: A quick example (without resource cleaning) using stax-utils (https://stax-utils.dev.java.net/):

XMLOutputFactory xmlOutputFactory = XMLOutputFactory.newInstance();
FileOutputStream file = new FileOutputStream("d:/file.xml");
XMLEventWriter writer = xmlOutputFactory.createXMLEventWriter(file);
writer = new IndentingXMLEventWriter(writer);
XMLEventFactory eventFactory = XMLEventFactory.newInstance();
writer.add(eventFactory.createStartDocument());
writer.add(eventFactory.createStartElement("", "", "a"));
writer.add(eventFactory.createStartElement("", "", "b"));
writer.add(eventFactory.createEndElement("", "", "b"));
writer.add(eventFactory.createEndElement("", "", "a"));
writer.add(eventFactory.createEndDocument());

This gives you:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<a>
  <b></b>
</a>

I did check that, can you give some example having the code snippet to pass my xml file and set the indent option. In the example provided at the above location, I am not able to understand how to set all this params. — Anurag, Jun 01 '10 at 12:00

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 17 '12 at 06:57

Example pretty printing OMElement (Axiom library) via StAX:

OMElement mapArg = fac.createOMElement(name, elementNs);
mapArg.addAttribute("type", soapXml.getPrefix() + ":Map", xsi);
PropertyDescriptor[] properties = PropertyUtils.getPropertyDescriptors(value);
for (PropertyDescriptor property : properties) {
    if (property.getName().equals("class"))
        continue;
    try {
        mapArg.addChild(keyValue(property.getName(),
                PropertyUtils.getProperty(value, property.getName())));
    } catch (Exception e) {
    }
}
final StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
try {
    IndentingXMLStreamWriter xmlWriter = new IndentingXMLStreamWriter(StaxUtilsXMLOutputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamWriter(stringWriter));
    mapArg.serialize(xmlWriter);
    System.out.println(stringWriter.toString());
} catch (XMLStreamException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
}

Formatting XML file using StAX

3 Answers3

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