XPath, XML Namespaces and Java

Question

I\'ve spent the past day attempting to extract a one XML node out of the following document and am unable to grasp the nuances of XML Namespaces to make it work.

The

Answer 1

Have a look at the XPathAPI library. It is a simpler way to use XPath without messing with the low-level Java API, especially when dealing with namespaces.

The code to get the number attribute would be:

String num = XPathAPI.selectSingleNodeAsString(doc, '//documentnbr/@number');

Namespaces are automatically extracted from the root node (doc in this case). In case you need to explicitly define additional namespaces you can use this:

Map nsMap = new HashMap();
nsMap.put("xforms", "http://www.w3.org/2003/xforms");

String num =
    XPathAPI.selectSingleNodeAsString(doc, '//documentnbr/@number', nsMap);

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of the library.)