Question

I want to add an XPath attribute to all <definition> tags in my XML document. The XPath’s value will come from a nested tag <term>Test123</term> inside each <definition> tag. I’m using the import org.w3c.dom.Document; object. When I run this line with my really long XML file then it tells me that there are 539 instances of the <definition> tag:

System.out.println(inputDOM.getDocumentElement().getElementsByTagName("definition"));

So the end result is that there must be a Document object that has set all the definition tags from the term tags, for example

<definition XPath="Test123"> <term>Test123</term> </definition>

Answer 1

Try something like this

NodeList definitionElements = inputDOM.getElementsByTagName("definition");
for (int i = 0; i < definitionElements.getLength(); i++) {
    Element current = (Element) definitionElements.item(i);
    Node term = current.getElementsByTagName("term").item(0);
    if(term != null && term.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
        current.setAttribute("XPath", ((Element) term).getTextContent());
}

First we get all <definition> tags. After that we iterate each <definition> tag and set a new attributs “XPath” whose value is the text content of the <term> child tag