Escape XML problem

Question

Hi,
This is a FAQ, however, I did a search before posting to the forum but could not find a definite solution. Here is what I am trying to do:
A webservice is returning a response XML and I am trying to display it on client console. I am able to display it properly on server side. The response is received by client of type 'Document'.
I create a transformer to get a string and display it on the console, and this is how it is done:
TransformerFactory tFactory =
    TransformerFactory.newInstance();
  Transformer transformer = tFactory.newTransformer();
  DOMSource source = new DOMSource(document);
  StreamResult result = new StreamResult(System.out);
  transformer.transform(source, result);I get the writer out of the result and do 'toString()' to get the text. but the output shows & lt; instead of <  and similarly of > alsoWhat am I missing? and how do I fix this? Can anyone help me with this? Many of the posts direct to using the parser, i hope they refer to using DocumentBuilderFactory and then factory.parse(..) to get the document... but as I already have the document I did not use it...
Thanx in advance.

Answer 1

What you are missing is the explanation of why that is a problem.
It's normal to escape "<" as "&lt;" if you are talking about data in a text node. But it is not normal to escape the "<" that starts a tag... unless you have an XML document embedded as a text node in an envelope-type document, in which case its tags are treated as text. This sort of thing happens in web services.
So, do you have a problem? I'm not convinced you do.