Parse XML Self-Closing Tags with Text

Hey everyone I am trying to parse this part of an XML file I have. The problem I am encountering is that the text contains a lot of self-closing tags. I can't remove those tags because they are providing me with some indexing detail. How can I get access to the text without all the "Node" tags?

<TextWithNodes>
 <Node id="0"/>A TEENAGER <Node
id="11"/>yesterday<Node id="20"/> accused his parents of cruelty
by feeding him a daily diet of chips which sent his weight
ballooning to 22st at the age of l2<Node id="146"/>.<Node
id="147"/>
</TextWithNodes>

Solution

Here is some sample code using the idea of using XPATH in Java in answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/49926918/2735286 (credits to @kjhughes):

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, XPathExpressionException {

    String text = "<TextWithNodes>\n" +
            " <Node id=\"0\"/>A TEENAGER <Node\n" +
            "id=\"11\"/>yesterday<Node id=\"20\"/> accused his parents of cruelty\n" +
            "by feeding him a daily diet of chips which sent his weight\n" +
            "ballooning to 22st at the age of l2<Node id=\"146\"/>.<Node\n" +
            "id=\"147\"/>\n" +
            "</TextWithNodes>";
    DocumentBuilderFactory builderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder builder = builderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document xmlDocument = builder.parse(new ByteArrayInputStream(text.getBytes("UTF-8")));
    XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
    String expression = "//TextWithNodes";
    System.out.println(xPath.compile(expression).evaluate(xmlDocument, XPathConstants.STRING));
}

This prints out:

A TEENAGER yesterday accused his parents of cruelty by feeding him a daily diet of chips which sent his weight ballooning to 22st at the age of l2.