Java SAX is not parsing properly

I would appreciate any help on this. This is my first handler I wrote.

I got I REST Webservice returning XML of links. It has quite simple structure and is not deep. I wrote a handler for this:

public class SAXHandlerLnk extends DefaultHandler {

    public List<Link> lnkList = new ArrayList();
    Link lnk = null;
    String content = null;

    @Override
    //Triggered when the start of tag is found.
    public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {

        if (qName.equals("link")) {
            lnk = new Link();
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName) throws SAXException {
        if (qName.equals("link")) {
            lnkList.add(lnk);
        }
        else if (qName.equals("applicationCode")) {
            lnk.applicationCode = content;
        }
        else if (qName.equals("moduleCode")) {
            lnk.moduleCode = content;
        }
        else if (qName.equals("linkCode")) {
            lnk.linkCode = content;
        }
        else if (qName.equals("languageCode")) {
            lnk.languageCode = content;
        }
        else if (qName.equals("value")) {
            lnk.value = content;
        }
        else if (qName.equals("illustrationUrl")) {
            lnk.illustrationUrl = content;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) throws SAXException {
        content = String.copyValueOf(ch, start, length).trim();
    }
}

Some XML returned can be empty eg. or . When this happens my handler unfortunatelly adds previous value to the Object lnk. So when is empty in XML, I got lnk.illustrationUrl = content; equal to lnk.value.

Link{applicationCode='onedownload', moduleCode='onedownload',...}

In the above example, I would like moduleCode to be empty or null, because in XML it is an empty tag.

Here is the calling class:

public class XMLRepositoryRestLinksFilterSAXParser {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        SAXParserFactory parserFactor = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
        SAXParser parser = parserFactor.newSAXParser();
        SAXHandlerLnk handler = new SAXHandlerLnk();
        parser.parse({URL}, handler);

        for ( Link lnk : handler.lnkList){
            System.out.println(lnk);
        }
    }
}