Using dom4j and Java to extract data in XML

With dom4j you can use in the Java platform to work with the XML, XPath and XSLT. It is an open source library that uses the collections framework and supports SAX, JAXP, and DOM.

You can download dom4j from http://www.dom4j.org/download.html

It is easy to work with the XML file using dom4j. Creating a document object is straight forward by using dom4j. In JAXP you would be creating two more objects before you create a document object. To parse an XML file into the document object, you can use the SAXReader as follows using dom4j.

SAXReader rdr = new SAXReader();
Document doc = rdr.read("path_to_xmlfile.xml");

For the above statement to work properly you should have installed dom4j in your system and should have done the following imports in your code.

import org.dom4j.Document;
import org.dom4j.DocumentException;
import org.dom4j.io.SAXReader;

Getting the root element is easy with the getRootElement() method and you can iterate through the elements through standard Java Iterators. Sample codes for some of the methods are available in the dom4j.org website.