The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Returning String Representations

Because the next method only returns integers corresponding to underlying event types, you typically need to map these integers to string representations of the events; for example:

public final static String getEventTypeString(int eventType) {
    switch (eventType) {
        case XMLEvent.START_ELEMENT:
            return "START_ELEMENT";
        case XMLEvent.END_ELEMENT:
            return "END_ELEMENT";
        case XMLEvent.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION:
            return "PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION";
        case XMLEvent.CHARACTERS:
            return "CHARACTERS";
        case XMLEvent.COMMENT:
            return "COMMENT";
        case XMLEvent.START_DOCUMENT:
            return "START_DOCUMENT";
        case XMLEvent.END_DOCUMENT:
            return "END_DOCUMENT";
        case XMLEvent.ENTITY_REFERENCE:
            return "ENTITY_REFERENCE";
        case XMLEvent.ATTRIBUTE:
            return "ATTRIBUTE";
        case XMLEvent.DTD:
            return "DTD";
        case XMLEvent.CDATA:
            return "CDATA";
        case XMLEvent.SPACE:
            return "SPACE";
    }
    return "UNKNOWN_EVENT_TYPE , " + eventType;
}