Question

Let us say I have an xml tag like:

<test val="val1 ">Test XML</test>

I want to parse the value “val1” whenever <test> tag occurs in the file so that I can save it to an array.

Answer 1

You can load the XML from the file and select all elements with tag name test and extract attribute value from it.

Basically:

doc.getElementsByTagName("test") in order to select all "test" elements, and for each element found you can select its attribute named "val" with node.getAttributes().getNamedItem("val") and from this one, if not null just getTextContent() to take its text content.

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A sample code could be something like:

// temporary result list just to store the values found
ArrayList<String> result = new ArrayList<String>();

DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = documentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = documentBuilder.parse(new ByteArrayInputStream("<document><test val=\"val1\">Test XML</test><test val=\"val2\">Test XML</test><test val=\"val3\">Test XML</test></document>".getBytes()));
// you could use something like: documentBuilder.parse(new FileInputStream("fileName.ext")); instead

// get test nodes and iterate over it checking test attribute
NodeList elements = doc.getElementsByTagName("test");
for (int i = 0; i < elements.getLength(); i++) {
    Node node = elements.item(i);
    Node attribute = node.getAttributes().getNamedItem("val");
    if (attribute != null) {
        result.add(attribute.getTextContent());
    }
}

// get result values in a string array (if collection is preferred use result instead)
String[] array = result.toArray(new String[] {});

// just print it in a readable format
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(array));

This will print:

[val1, val2, val3]