Transforming certain elements of xml-doc to bytearray representing xml?

Question

I have a xml-file like this.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Family>
     <Person>
              <Name>Suzy</Name>
          <Nick>Mom</Nick>
       </Person
     <Person>
              <Name>Pete</Name>
          <Nick>Dad</Nick>
     </Person>
</Family>I am interested in fetching all the Person-elments, make them into separate xml-document like this.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Person>
         <Name>Suzy</Name>
     <Nick>Mom</Nick>
</PersonThe Person-elements are collected using JDOM (ElementFilter("Person")). Afterwords I want to transform the xml-documents to byte arrays. The xml-documents shall never be written to file.
I am a bit sure on how to procede after I have fetched the Person-elements. I want them into an xml-document, and then I think convert the documents to a bytearray?
Does anyone have suggestions on how to get this done:
1) How to make each of the elements into a xml-document?
2) How to get the xml-document to a byte-array, via a String?
And, does this approach sound crazy, is there an obvious solution I am not seeing?

Answer 1

No, generally, serialization means outputting to a network or file or database (e.g., going from object to stream). There is java.io.Serializable which serializes to Java's custom format. However, you can also serialize out as XML.
public final class DomSerializer extends Object {
     // Class Variables //
     private static final TransformerFactory factory;
     // Constructors //
     static {
          try {
               factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
          catch (TransformerFactoryConfigurationError fatal) {
               throw new ConfigurationError("Unable to create XSLT transformer factory", fatal);
     private DomSerializer() {
          super();
     // Public Methods //
     public static final void serialize(final Document target, final OutputStream out) {
          Transformer transformer = createTransformer();
          try {
               transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
               transformer.transform(new DOMSource(target), new StreamResult(out));
          catch (TransformerException e) {
               throw new SerializationError("Error serializing DOM document", e);
     public static final String serialize(final Document target) {
          ByteArrayOutputStream byteOut = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
          serialize(target, byteOut);
          return new String(byteOut.toByteArray());
     // Private Methods //
     private static Transformer createTransformer() {
          try {
               Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer();
               transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "Yes");
               return transformer;
          catch (TransformerConfigurationException fatal) {
               throw new ConfigurationError("Unable to create a new XSLT transformer", fatal);
}