Remove empty tags at XML using Java

Question

I'm giving some functionality to a servlet, one of the things I want to do is, when receiving the InputStream (which is basically a PDF document parsed into an XML format) set that data to a String object, then I try to delete all the empty tags, but I haven't got any good result so far:

This is the data the servlet is receiving

    <form1>
        <GenInfo>
            <Section1>
                <EmployeeDet>
                    <Title>999990000</Title>
                    <Firstname>MIKE</Firstname>
                    <Surname>SPENCER</Surname>
                    <CoName/>
                    <EmpAdd>
                        <Address><Add1/><Add2/><Town/><County/><Pcode/></Address>
                    </EmpAdd>
                    <PosHeld>DEVELOPER</PosHeld>
                    <Email/>
                    <ConNo/>
                    <Nationality/>
                    <PPSNo/>
                    <EmpNo/>
                </EmployeeDet>
            </Section1>
        </GenInfo>
    </form1>

The final result should be looking like this:

    <form1>
        <GenInfo>
            <Section1>
                <EmployeeDet>
                    <Title>999990000</Title>
                    <Firstname>MIKE</Firstname>
                    <Surname>SPENCER</Surname>
                    <PosHeld>DEVELOPER</PosHeld>
                </EmployeeDet>
            </Section1>
        </GenInfo>
    </form1>

My apologies if it is a repeated question but I did some research over similar posts and none of them could provide me the correct approach, that's why I am asking you in a separate post.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Here's regex way of doing what you're wanting. I'm sure there are probably some "edge" cases that I'm not thinking of, but sometimes you can't tell when you use regex. Also, a DOM parser is probably the best way to do this.

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    String[] patterns = new String[] {
        // This will remove empty elements that look like <ElementName/>
        "\\s*<\\w+/>", 
        // This will remove empty elements that look like <ElementName></ElementName>
        "\\s*<\\w+></\\w+>", 
        // This will remove empty elements that look like 
        // <ElementName>
        // </ElementName>
        "\\s*<\\w+>\n*\\s*</\\w+>"
    };

    String xml = "    <form1>\n" +
                    "        <GenInfo>\n" +
                    "            <Section1>\n" +
                    "                <EmployeeDet>\n" +
                    "                    <Title>999990000</Title>\n" +
                    "                    <Firstname>MIKE</Firstname>\n" +
                    "                    <Surname>SPENCER</Surname>\n" +
                    "                    <CoName/>\n" +
                    "                    <EmpAdd>\n" +
                    "                        <Address><Add1/><Add2/><Town/><County/><Pcode/></Address>\n" +
                    "                    </EmpAdd>\n" +
                    "                    <PosHeld>DEVELOPER</PosHeld>\n" +
                    "                    <Email/>\n" +
                    "                    <ConNo/>\n" +
                    "                    <Nationality/>\n" +
                    "                    <PPSNo/>\n" +
                    "                    <EmpNo/>\n" +
                    "                </EmployeeDet>\n" +
                    "            </Section1>\n" +
                    "        </GenInfo>\n" +
                    "    </form1>";

    for (String pattern : patterns) {
        Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile(pattern).matcher(xml);
        xml = matcher.replaceAll("");
    }

    System.out.println(xml);
}

Results:

    <form1>
        <GenInfo>
            <Section1>
                <EmployeeDet>
                    <Title>999990000</Title>
                    <Firstname>MIKE</Firstname>
                    <Surname>SPENCER</Surname>
                    <PosHeld>DEVELOPER</PosHeld>
                </EmployeeDet>
            </Section1>
        </GenInfo>
    </form1>

Answer 2

What you have to do is iterate recursively over all the nodes. And once you've found a leaf, it's it's empty just remove it.

There is a very good example using DOM parser here