Using java and parsing XML documents

You can use Java to parse the XML documents. There are classes available in Java for this purpose. It is easy to work with an XML document, navigate through the elements, and edit or print it out, if you use the proper classes and methods available for this purpose.

To work with an XML document using Java, you have to import certain packages and classes. The following import statements are needed to work with an XML document using Java.

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;

Once you import these in your Java program, you can create a document object that can be used to load the XML document and work with it. There are three steps involved in creating a document object. You would have created it straight in other scripting languages.

In Java you have to create a DocumentBuilderFactory object, then a DocumentBuilder and then finally the Document object. Methods like newDocumentBuilder() of the DocumentBuilderFactory is used to create the DocumentBuilder object and then the Document object is created using the DocumentBuilder object.

Once the Document object is available you can use the getElementByTagName() method to get all the elements of a particular name and load them in a NodeList. Use a "for" loop to work with those elements.