Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hi,

I have an application which sends XML message similar to:

<ParentElement>
<Data><![CDATA[&lt ;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt ;
&lt ;Element1&gt ;
&lt ;Element2&gt ;mydata&lt ;/Element2&gt ;
&lt ;/Element1&gt ;]]></Data>
</ParentElement>

I require to fetch the content from the Data element and convert it to XML. I do this by fetching the content in Data element as String and replacing &lt ; &gt ; and &quot ; using replaceAll method in java.lang.String and then use DOM API to convert String to XML. Is there a better way of doing this instead of using the replaceAll method and transforming the xml in String to DOM? Please note for display purposes I have a space between lt and semi-colon in the XML