Suggestion to parse this XML in Java

Question

Not new to Java; but relatively new to XML-parsing. I know a tiny bit about a lot of the XML tools out there, but not much about any of them. I am also not an XML-pro.

Answer 1

If your XML documents are relatively small (as appears to be the case here), I would use the DOM framework and XPath class. Here is some boilerplate DOM/XPath code from one of my tutorials:

File xmlFile = ...
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(xmlFile);

XPath xp = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
String value = xp.evaluate("/path/to/element/text()", doc);
// .. reuse xp to get other values as required

In other words, basically you:

• get your XML into a Document object, via a DocumentBuilder;

• create an XPath object;

• repeatedly call XPath.evaluate(), passing in the path of the element(s) required and your Document.

As you see, there's a little bit of fiddliness in getting hold of your Document object and like all good XML APIs, it throws a plethora of silly pointless checked exceptions. But apart from that, it's fairly no-nonsense for parsing simple small to medium XML documents whose structure is relatively fixed.