Remove Element DOM,Remove Element from DOM,Delete Element,Delete XML Node

Remove Element from XML Document

In this section, you will learn to remove any element from a given XML document. Whenever you remove the xml element from the xml document the data are also lost from the xml element.

Description of program:

This program takes a XML file name on the console. At the run time the program asks for an element name to be deleted. The removeChild() method removes the given element from the XML document by invoking the getParentNode() method .

Here is the XML File:E-mail.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<E-mail>
<To>Rohan</To>
<From>Amit</From>
<Subject>Surprise....</Subject>
<Body>Be ready for a cruise...</Body>
</E-mail>


import java.io.*;

import org.w3c.dom.*;

import org.xml.sax.*;

import javax.xml.parsers.*;

import javax.xml.transform.*; 

import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource; 

import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;



public class RemoveElement {

  static public void main(String[] arg) {

    try{

      BufferedReader bf = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

      System.out.print("Enter a XML file name: ");

      String xmlFile = bf.readLine();

      File file = new File(xmlFile);

      System.out.print("Enter an element which have to delete: ");

      String remElement = bf.readLine();

      if (file.exists()){

        DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

        DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();

        Document doc = builder.parse(xmlFile);

        TransformerFactory tFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();

        Transformer tFormer = tFactory.newTransformer();

        Element element = (Element)doc.getElementsByTagName(remElement).item(0);

//        Remove the node

        element.getParentNode().removeChild(element);

//              Normalize the DOM tree to combine all adjacent nodes

        doc.normalize();

        Source source = new DOMSource(doc);

        Result dest = new StreamResult(System.out);

        tFormer.transform(source, dest);

        System.out.println();

      }

      else{

        System.out.println("File not found!");

      }

    }

    catch (Exception e){

      System.err.println(e);

      System.exit(0);

    }

  }

}

Output of this program:

C:\vinod\xml>javac RemoveElement.java

C:\vinod\xml>java RemoveElement
Enter a XML file name: E-mail.xml
Enter an element which have to delete: Subject
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><E-mail>
<To>Rohan</To>
<From>Amit</From>

<Body>Be ready for a cruise...</Body>
</E-mail>