Question

I’m trying to read in an XML using DOM in Java

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<record>
<user>
    <name>Leo</name>
    <email>****@****.com</email>
        <food-list>
            <food>Hamburgers</food>
            <food>Fish</food>
        </food-list>
</user>
</record>

My current solution is

    for (int userNumber = 0; userNumber < masterList.getLength(); userNumber++) {

           Node singleUserEntry = masterList.item(userNumber);
           if (singleUserEntry.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {

              org.w3c.dom.Element userEntryElement = (org.w3c.dom.Element) singleUserEntry;



              System.out.println("name : " + getTagValue("name", userEntryElement));
              System.out.println("email : " +getTagValue("email", userEntryElement));
              NodeList foodList = userEntryElement.getElementsByTagName("food-list").item(0).getChildNodes();
              for(int i = 0; i < foodList.getLength(); i++){
                  Node foodNode = foodList.item(i);
                  System.out.println("food : " + foodNode.getNodeValue());
              }

private static String getTagValue(String sTag, org.w3c.dom.Element eElement) {
     NodeList nlList =  eElement.getElementsByTagName(sTag).item(0).getChildNodes();
     Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);
     return nValue.getNodeValue();

And the output now is

name : Leo 
email : ******@*****.com
food :          
food : null
food :          
food : null
food : 

Which quite confuses me. Could you tell me where I’m wrong? The number of food tags is not pre-defined.

Answer 1

((Node) foodNode.getChildNodes().item(0)).getNodeValue()

Note that, as you can clearly see, dealing with the DOM API in Java is pretty painful. Have you looked at JDOM or dom4j?