Question

I know how to parse XML documents with DOM when they are in the form:

<tagname> valueIWant </tagname>

However, the element I’m now trying to get is instead in the form

<photo farm="9" id="8147664661" isfamily="0" isfriend="0" ispublic="1" 
       owner="8437609@N04" secret="4902a217af" server="8192" title="Rainbow"/>

I usually use cel.getTextContent() to return the value, but that doesn’t work in this case. Neither does cel.getAttributes(), which I thought would work…

Ideally, I need to just get the id and owner numerical values. However if someone can help on how to get all of it, then I can deal with removing the parts I don’t want later.

Answer 1

What you’re looking to retrieve is the value of different attributes that are attached with an Element. Look at using the getAttribute(String name) method to achieve this

If you want to retrieve all the attributes, all you can do so using getAttributes() and iterate through it. An example of both of these methods might be something like this:

private void getData(Document document){
    if(document == null)
        return;

    NodeList list = document.getElementsByTagName("photo");
    Element photoElement = null;

    if(list.getLength() > 0){
        photoElement = (Element) list.item(0);
    }

    if(photoElement != null){
        System.out.println("ID: "+photoElement.getAttribute("id"));
        System.out.println("Owner: "+photoElement.getAttribute("owner"));

        NamedNodeMap childList = photoElement.getAttributes();
        Attr attribute;

        for(int index = 0; index < childList.getLength(); index++){
            if(childList.item(index).getNodeType() == Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE){
                attribute = ((Attr)childList.item(index));
                System.out.println(attribute.getNodeName()+" : "+attribute.getNodeValue());
            }else{
                System.out.println(childList.item(index).getNodeType());
            }
        }
    }
}