XML DOM working in Java, not working in Tomcat

Question

This is a really strange one (to me anyway) !
We have some XML parsing classes tested in Eclipse that run just fine as Java code. When we try to use them in Tomcat, though, we get an error with getDocumentElement() - it always truncates at the beginning of the XML. This is the XML string we are using for testing in Eclipse:
"<rft><pollcfg><tmo>200</tmo><retry>5</retry>"
+ "<mapping>"
+ "<name>Simulation</name>"
+ "<subnet>0</subnet>"
+ "<comm>com8</comm>"
+ "</mapping>"
+ "<comm>com11</comm>"
+ "<comm>com12</comm>"
+ "<subnet>1</subnet>"
+ "<subnet>2</subnet>"
+ "<subnet>3</subnet>"
+ "<subnet>4</subnet>"
+ "</rft>";
And we load this string into a DOM as follows
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbf.setValidating(false);
dbf.setNamespaceAware(true);
dbf.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);
DocumentBuilder builder = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(XMLRetrievedData.getBytes());
doc = builder.parse(bais);
ANd then we can say :
System.out.println( "getDocumentElement() was " + doc.getDocumentElement() );
and we get the XML.
If we run this in Tomcat the line
System.out.println( "getDocumentElement() was " + doc.getDocumentElement() );
produces
[rft: null]
instead of the XML we get when we run the same code in Eclipse !!
We want to parse the DOM, delete some elements and add some new elements. Then we want to return the altered DOM as a String .. for whatever client needs it.
Any ideas about this ? What could be wrong ?
Thanks !!

Answer 1

Beg pardon - I should have said we are loading the XML string shown into the String XMLRetrievedData. That's how the 'rft' part of the [rft: null] gets into Tomcat's output.
Strange ...