Proper use of normalize(); XML spaces not removed

Question

Ok so I was up till 3 AM trying to figure out why normalize is not removing white space. I have nothing left to normalize() except my brain. Any help would be appreciated.
Code snippit to remove children & parents
if( !elemSave ){
while( ((Element) n).hasChildNodes() ) {
((Element) n).removeChild( ((Element) n).getLastChild() );
((Element) n).getParentNode().normalize();
//have tried normalize here doesnt close the spaces
((Element) n).getParentNode().removeChild((Element) n);
//tried normalize here doesnt close the spaces
document.normalize();
return document;
------- Resulting XML ---------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Entity createddate="6/19/08" defaultrole="CONTR_CAND" id="93023" updateddate="2/6/09">
<Role>CONTR_CAND</Role>
<Property bisuniqueid="6172" name="SKILLS" occurrence="1">
<Attribute name="SKILL" sqldatatype="NUMERIC"/>
<Attribute name="YEAR_EXP" sqldatatype="NUMERIC"/>
<Attribute name="LEVEL" sqldatatype="NUMERIC"/>
</Property>
<Property bisuniqueid="4385" name="JOB_CAT" occurrence="1">
<Attribute name="JOB_CATEGORY" sqldatatype="NUMERIC">8253425</Attribute>
</Property>
</Entity>

Answer 1

find it odd that you can delete the child nodes of an Element and there is no space <Property name="something" /> but when you delete the Element that held the children you come up with an empty space.I have no clue what you're saying here. The whitespace around an element is held as a peer of the element, not its child.
Thanks for the idea kdgregory but I would rather use JDK. The project is open source. You could simply copy the relevant method into your own code (although the Apache license requires you to acknowledge the source):
    public static void removeEmptyTextRecursive(Element elem)
        NodeList children = elem.getChildNodes();
        for (int ii = children.getLength() - 1 ; ii >= 0 ; ii--)
            Node child = children.item(ii);
            switch (child.getNodeType())
                case Node.ELEMENT_NODE :
                    removeEmptyTextRecursive((Element)child);
                    break;
                case Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE :
                case Node.TEXT_NODE :
                    if (StringUtils.isBlank(child.getNodeValue()))
                        elem.removeChild(child);
                    break;
                default :
                    // do nothing
    }There is still a dependency on Jakarta Commons-Lang StringUtils, but I'll leave the copying of that method up to you.
... although you really should start using utility libraries -- they exist because other people have run into the same issues.