Question

I have an XML config file that has just one parent and one child. This will always be like this and never change. It looks something like this:

<parent>
   <child1>test</child1>
   <child2>123</child2>
</parent>

I want to use java DOM (org.w3c.dom.Document) to parse the XML into a TreeMap so that I can access the attributes as keys/values. I’m guessing I’d need to create a for loop that scans through the XML and adds the key (parent) and value (child) line by line?

Answer 1

You can traverse the XML document using JAXP APIs, you don’t need to know the structure or node names in advance

InputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(xml.getBytes("UTF-8"));
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder docBuilder = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = docBuilder.parse(is);
NodeList nodeList = doc.getChildNodes();

and you can iterate on document and get the nodes and attributes

for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
            Node node = nodeList.item(i);
            NamedNodeMap attributes = node.getAttributes();

//...

}