Output to a file in java

I wanna remove element from xml file, when I run the following code I get the correct output when I'm outputing to console but when I'm trying to ouptup the same code to a file I get the same / original xml file without removed element, here is the code :

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 RemoveBlock {

  static public void main(String[] arg) {
    try{
      String xmlFile = "Management.xml";
      File file = new File(xmlFile);
      String remElement = "Physical_Order_List_Array";
      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();
       // saveStringToFile("emir.xml", "dsds"); -> write method
      }
      else{
        System.out.println("File not found!");
      }
    }
    catch (Exception e){
      System.err.println(e);
      System.exit(0);
    }
  }
}

The code above is working but when I want to change it to output to a file like : Result dest = new StreamResult(new File("foo.xml")); or Result dest = new StreamResult(new FileOutputStream("foo.xml")); its not working, any indications why ?

Thank you

not entirely sure, but I think you can't transform a DOM Document into a stream result without serializing it first.

look at the docs for org.apache.xml.serializer.DOMSerializer;

here's some code fragments that may be helpful.

public static Serializer getSerializer()
	{
		Properties props = OutputPropertiesFactory.getDefaultMethodProperties("xml");
		ser = SerializerFactory.getSerializer(props);
		return ser;
	}

os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ros = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
getSerializer().setOutputStream(os);
DOMSerializer dser = getSerializer().asDOMSerializer();
dser.serialize(document);
is = new ByteArrayInputStream(os.toByteArray());
source = new StreamSource(is);
result = new StreamResult(ros);

tnx for your answer .. I've writen removeallnodes method which goes trough every child of a element I wanna get rid of and it works now as it should

Since your code does a transform anyway, consider using the following XSLT:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
<!-- Passthru for XML tags -->
<xsl:template match="*">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="Physical_Order_List_Array"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This XSL removes the need for this code:

        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();

A bonus of the XSL approach is that you don't even have to write a Java program. On Linux run

xsltproc --output destination.xml prune.xsl source.xml