XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Adam Constabaris <adamc AT unc.edu>]

John Cowan wrote:
> Luca Passani scripsit:
>
>
> > How do I force XOM to diplay '<' and not &lt; ?
>
>
> You don't want it to.  Remember that XOM is generating XML, not HTML, and
> in XML, a < character may appear only at the beginning of a tag.  If
> XOM were to do what you want it to, the output would not be well-formed
> (which is another way of saying it is not XML at all).
>
> If you want to write HTML output, you can use the hacked version of
> XMLWriter packaged with TagSoup.

An alternate, which requires careful work, is to wrap the contents of 
your script in a Comment element.  This will 'preserve' the < in the 
body of the comment; since, however, JavaScript parsers don't recognize 
the end part of the XML comment ("-->"), so if you don't want the 
inserted script to cause JavaScript errors, you need to make sure the 
final bit of text in the comment is "// ", e.g.

                Element root = new Element("script");
                StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
                b.append("function foo() {\n")
                .append("\tif ( 7 < 9 ) {\n")
                .append("\t\tdocument.writeln('yep');\n")
                .append("\t}\n}\n // ");
                Comment comment = new Comment(b.toString());
                root.appendChild(comment);
                System.out.println(root.toXML());

(if you're on a pre-1.5 JDK, change that StringBuilder to a StringBuffer)

cheers

--
Adam Constabaris
Applications Analyst
ITS Knowledge Management
UNC-CH