Null Pointer Exception in XMl Parsing

Question

I need to parser an Xml Document and store the values in Text File, when i am parsing normal data (If all tags have data) then its working fine, but if any tag doesnt have d

Answer 1

NodeList nlList = eElement.getElementsByTagName(sTag).item(0).getChildNodes();

The above line gets the child nodes of the element with the given tag name. If this element doesn't have data, the returned node list is empty.

Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);

The above line gets the first element from the empty node list. Since the list is empty, 0 is an invalid index, and as per the documentation, null is returned

return nValue.getNodeValue();

The above line thus calls a method on a null variable, which causes the NPE.

You should test if the list is empty, and return what you want (an empty string, for example), if it's the case:

if (nList.getLength() == 0) {
    return "";
}
Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);
return nValue.getNodeValue();