p tags with attributes not removed from JTextPane

Question

We are using HTMLEditorKit with JtextPane to create a HTML Document Editor, for our project. [JDK 1.3.1.]
When we have a simple <p> tag for paragraph in HTML and we start deleting things from end of the document, it works fine. But when we have a <P> tag with attributes like <p align='CENTER'> the delete key deletes the characters but the cursor remains in the line below and doesnot move up as the characters of above para get deleted. The HTML also retains the <p align='CENTER'> tag, which should have been removed. It seems its not able to identify <p> tags with attributes as Html para tags, and so not deleting it.
How do we solve this without migrating to jdk1.4 ? Please help.

Answer 1

Usually attributes such as 'align=center' are deleted along with a tag, regardless of whether it is a p tag or another one. But you would have to carefully test what exactly gets deleted because attributes are not only stored with paragraphs. They can exist for single characters and as well come from a style sheet.
The best is to generate a dump of your document before and after deletion.
You can use something like the below code (it is not optimized at all and thus could be implemented better but it works) to produce a dump
  public void listElements(Element elem, int indent) {
    int i;
    String is = getIndent(indent);
    String elemName = elem.getName();
    Document elemDoc = elem.getDocument();
    String cont = "";
    String theText = "";
    System.out.println(is + "--start-----");
    System.out.println(is + "Element Name:" + elemName);
    if(elemName.equals(new String("content"))) {
      try {
        theText = elemDoc.getText(
                elem.getStartOffset(),
                elem.getEndOffset() - elem.getStartOffset());
        System.out.println(is + "Content: " + theText);
        if(theText.indexOf("\r") > -1) {
          System.out.println(is + " plus \\r");
        if(theText.indexOf("\n") > -1) {
          System.out.println(is + " plus \\n");
      catch (Exception e) {
    listAttributes(elem, indent);
    if(!elem.isLeaf()) {
      for(i=0;i<elem.getElementCount();i++) {
        listElements(elem.getElement(i),indent+2);
    System.out.println(is + "---end----");
  public void listAttributes(Element elem, int indent) {
    Object key;
    String attr;
    String attrName;
    int pos;
    String is = getIndent(indent);
    AttributeSet as = elem.getAttributes();
    Enumeration an = as.getAttributeNames();
    try {
      while(an.hasMoreElements()) {
        key = an.nextElement();
        attrName = key.toString();
        attr = as.getAttribute(key).toString();
        System.out.println(is + "Attribute Name: " +
                  attrName + " Attribute Content: " + attr);
        if(attr.indexOf("\r") > -1) {
          System.out.println(is + " plus \\r");
        if(attr.indexOf("\n") > -1) {
          System.out.println(is + " plus \\n");
    catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
  }Hope that helps
Ulrich