Java HTML / XML How to - Add a new element to the given parent

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Question

We would like to know how to add a new element to the given parent.

Answer

import java.io.StringReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
//w  w  w.  j a va 2s  .  c  o m
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerException;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;

public class Main {
  public static String getXMLData() {
    return "<a attr='value'></a>";
  }

  public static void main(String[] argv) throws Exception {
    DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    Document doc = factory.newDocumentBuilder().parse(
        new InputSource(new StringReader(getXMLData())));

    createElement(doc.getDocumentElement(), "new");

    System.out.println(documentToString(doc));

  }

  public static Element createElement(Element parent, String name) {
    Document document;
    Element element;

    document = parent.getOwnerDocument();
    element  = document.createElement(name);

    parent.appendChild(element);
    return element;
  }
  public static String documentToString(Document document) {
    try {
      TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
      Transformer trans = tf.newTransformer();
      StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
      trans.transform(new DOMSource(document), new StreamResult(sw));
      return sw.toString();
    } catch (TransformerException tEx) {
      tEx.printStackTrace();
    }
    return null;
  }
}

The code above generates the following result.

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