Thread: Java Convert String of XML to Document object is null all the time

I am trying to parse a XML string into `org.w3c.dom.Document` object.

I have looked at solutions provided in a few blogs that give a variation of the same solution that I have written. But the `Document` object's #Document variable is always null and nothing gets parsed.

Here is the XML

     XMLMappingValidator v = new XMLMappingValidator("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\n" +
    "<mapping>\n" +
    "<container>\n" +
    "<source-container>c:\\stem.csv</source-container>\n" +
    "<source-type>CSV_FILE</source-type>\n" +
    "<target-container>db</target-container>\n" +
    "<target-type>MySQL_TABLE</target-type>\n" +
    "</container>\n" +
    "<entity>\n" +
    "<source-entity>stem</source-entity>\n" +
    "<target-entity>tbl_stem</target-entity>\n" +
    "</entity>\n" +
    "<attributes>\n" +
    "<attribute>\n" +
    "<datatype>SMALLINT</datatype>\n" +
    "<source-attribute>id</source-attribute>\n" +
    "<target-attribute>id</target-attribute>\n" +
    "</attribute>\n" +
    "<attribute>\n" +
    "<datatype>VARCHAR</datatype>\n" +
    "<source-attribute>name</source-attribute>\n" +
    "<target-attribute>name</target-attribute>\n" +
    "</attribute>\n" +
    "<attribute>\n" +
    "<datatype>TEXT</datatype>\n" +
    "<source-attribute>body</source-attribute>\n" +
    "<target-attribute>body</target-attribute>\n" +
    "</attribute>\n" +
    "<attribute>\n" +
    "<datatype>DATETIME</datatype>\n" +
    "<source-attribute>date</source-attribute>\n" +
    "<target-attribute>date</target-attribute>\n" +
    "</attribute>\n" +
    "<attribute>\n" +
    "<datatype>VARCHAR</datatype>\n" +
    "<source-attribute>info</source-attribute>\n" +
    "<target-attribute>info</target-attribute>\n" +
    "</attribute>\n" +
    "</attributes>\n" +
    "</mapping>");

The constructor XMLMappingValidator object's code is as follows

    public class XMLMappingValidator {
        private  Document xml;
        public XMLMappingValidator (String xmlString) throws 
                IOException, SAXException, ParserConfigurationException {
            DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();  
            DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();  
            this.xml = 
                    builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlString)));          
        }
 
        public Document getXML() {
            return xml;
        }
    }

When I call

**v.getXML().toString()**

I get

`[#document: null]`

Clearly, the parse is failing. But I don't understand why.

Any suggestions/help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

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