[jdom-interest] Removing 'Element's from a list during iteration

[Alastair Rodgers]

I'm using an Iterator to navigate a list of child elements. As I do this, I want to remove certain of these children from the JDOM tree based on whether or not some attribute is present. Since Element.getChildren(String) returns a "live" list, I had expected to be able to do this with Iterator.remove() as follows: 

    Element elBase = ...
    ...
    for (Iterator iter = elBase.getChildren("SomeElement").iterator(); iter.hasNext(); ) {
      Element el = (Element)iter.next();
      if (el.getAttributeValue("SomeAttribute") == null) {
        iter.remove();
      }
    }

However, I find that after calling iter.remove() if I look at the parent of 'el', it is still elBase, i.e. it hasn't been properly detached. If I replace the call to "iter.remove()" with "el.detach()" (which has the effect of invoking elBase.removeContent(el)) then it appears to work - el's parent is now null. However, this violates the general usage pattern of Iterator, as the following extract from the Javadoc for Iterator.remove() illustrates: 

<quote>
The behavior of an iterator is unspecified if the underlying collection is modified while the iteration is in progress in any way other than by calling this method.
</quote>


Is this the expected behaviour? If so, is it safe for me to substitute el.detach() in the above example, and ignore the J2SE Javadoc? 

Thanks in advance, 
Al.