Creating and Modifying XML Documents - Beginning Java 2 SDK - page 1052

builderFactory.setNamespaceAware(true); // Set namespace aware
builderFactory.setValidating(true); // and validating parser features
builderFactory.setIgnoringElementContentWhitespace(true);

Calling this method will result in a parser that will not report ignorable whitespace as a node, so you
won't see it in the Document object. If you run the example again with this change, the #text nodes
arising from ignorable whitespace will no longer be there. Of course, this is not necessarily a plus since
now the output produced by the toString() method is not as readable as it was before because
everything appears on a single line.

Node Types
We saw earlier that the subinterfaces of Node identify nodes of different types. Type Element
corresponds to an element and type Text identifies element content that is text. We also saw how we
could determine the type of a given Node reference using the instanceof operator. There's another
way of figuring out what a Node reference is that is often more convenient. The getNodeType()
method in the Node interface returns a value of type int that identifies the type of node. It can be any
of the following constant values that are defined in the Node interface:

DOCUMENT _ NODE DOCUMENT _ TYPE _ NODE

ELEMENT _ NODE ATTRIBUTE _ NODE

TEXT _ NODE CDATA _ SECTION _ NODE

DOCUMENT _ FRAGMENT _ NODE COMMENT _ NODE

ENTITY _ NODE ENTITY _ REFERENCE _ NODE

NOTATION _ NODE PROCESSING _ INSTRUCTION _ NODE

In the main it is obvious what type each of these represents. The DOCUMENT _ FRAGMENT _ NODE represents a
collection of elements that form part of a document. The advantage of having the type of node as an integer
is that we can sort out what type a given Node reference is by using a switch statement:

switch(node.getNodeType()) {
case Node.DOCUMENT _ NODE:
// Code to process a document node
break;
case Node.DOCUMENT _ TYPE _ NODE:
// Code to process a DOCTYPE node
break;
case Node.DOCUMENT _ NODE:
// Code to process a document node
break;
case Node.ELEMENT _ NODE:
// Code to process an element node
break;
// ... and so on for the rest of the type values...
default:
assert false;
}