Question

I have an XML like this:

<documentslist>
  <document>
    <docnumber>1</docnumber>
    <docname>Declaration of Human Rights</docname>
    <aoo>lib</aoo>
  </document>
  <document>
    <docnumber>2</docnumber>
    <docname>Fair trade</docname>
    <aoo>lib</aoo>
  </document>
  <document>
    <docnumber>3</docnumber>
    <docname>The wars for water</docname>
    <aoo>lib</aoo>
  </document>
  <!-- etc. -->
</documentslist>

I have this code:

//XML parsing
Document docsDoc = null;
try {
    DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
    docsDoc = db.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlWithDocs)));
}
catch(ParserConfigurationException e) {e.printStackTrace();}
catch(SAXException e) {e.printStackTrace();}
catch(IOException e) {e.printStackTrace();}
//retrieve document elements
NodeList docs = docsDoc.getElementsByTagName("document");

if (docs.getLength() > 0){
    //print a row for each document
    for (int i=0; i<docs.getLength(); i++){
        //get current document
        Node doc = docs.item(i);
        //print a cell for some document children
        for (int j=0; j<columns.length; j++){
            Node cell;
            //print docname
            cell = doc.getElementsByTagName("docname").item(0); //doesn't work
            System.out.print(cell.getTextContent() + "\t");
            //print aoo
            cell = doc.getElementsByTagName("aoo").item(0); //doesn't work
            System.out.print(cell.getTextContent() + "\t");
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
}

But, as you know Node hasn’t got getElementsByTagName method… Only Document has it. But I can’t do docsDoc.getElementsByTagName("aoo"), because it will return me all <aoo> nodes, not only the one existing in the <document> node I’m inspecting.

How could I do it? Thanks!

Answer 1

If the Node is not just any node, but actually an Element (it could also be e.g. an attribute or a text node), you can cast it to Element and use getElementsByTagName.