Deserializing an XML element containing other xml markup as a single string using SimpleXML

Question

I have been using SimpleXML for a while now to serialize my java objects, but I am still learning and run into trouble sometimes. I have the following XML that I want to deserialize:

<messages>
<message>
    <text>
       A communications error has occurred. Please try again, or contact  <a href="someURL">administrator</a>. Alternatively, please <a href = "someURL' />">register</a>. 
    </text>       
</message>

I would like process it such that the contents of the element are treated as a single string and the anchor tags to be ignored. I have no control on how this XML is generated - it is, as you can see, an error message from some server. How do I achieve this? Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You might want to try escaping the text by importing:

import static org.apache.commons.lang.StringEscapeUtils.escapeHtml;

And using it as:

a.setWordCloudStringToDisplay(escapeHtml(wordcloud));