Java util snippets

Utils.java

/**
Parse an XML String. It may be worthwhile to cache the DocumentBuilder
object so we do not need to create an object everytime the method is
invoked.

@param xml
@return an org.w3c.dom.Document object
@referece http://stackoverflow.com/a/562207/777225
*/
public static Document loadXMLFromString(String xml) throws Exception
{
    DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
    InputSource is = new InputSource(new StringReader(xml));
    return builder.parse(is);
}