CRLF not as text node

Question

How do I make the parser not to consider CRLF as text node?
I'm having trouble using getFirstChild() method if I parse an XML that looks like
<xml>
<Animals>
<Animal>
</Animal>
</Animals>
</xml>
The documentElement's(<xml>) firstChild expects to be <Animals>, but instead it is a text node which I believe is CRLF.
If I rewrite the XML in one line (with no CRLF) then firstChild is <Animals> as expected.
Any suggestion
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi the parser adds a TextNode for every new line (and even if you have only a space between two tags, it should be added) , this caused because the parser don't know if you want to read this information's.
It's quite confusing, than normally you would expect this to be the node value, but it isn't!
The node value by is normally null.
See
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/org/w3c/dom/Node.html
for more information.
Use getChildNodes and iterate trough them until you get a none TextNode.
The NodeList knows:
getLength()
item (int)
which is enough for a for loop.
Or if you know the name of the child, you can use:
getElementsByTagName(String name).item(0);
Hope this helps.
Greetings Michael