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Best method to parse various custom XML documents in Java

HI all,

I am beginner to java. I hope the question I am asking may be easy one. My question is if I had an XML file and i want to parse it get the elements only with in specific tag.
for example if XML file looks like..

<date>2005-10-31</date>
<number>12345</number>

<purchased-by>
    <name>My name</name>
    <address>My address</address>
</purchased-by>

    <order-items>

    <item>
        <code>687</code>
        <type>CD</type>
        <label>Some music</label>
    </item>

    <item>
        <code>129851</code>
        <type>DVD</type>
        <label>Some video</label>
    </item>

</order-items>

And from this XML I want to parse only the elements with in the tag name order-items.

Is there any generic way to do this..?Please let me know..
Thanks

Answer 1

As said in the comments, a short Google Search should bring you to the SUN examples on how to do this. Basically, you have two main XML parsing methods in Java :

• SAX, where you use an handler to only grab what you want in your XML and ditch the rest
• DOM, which parses your file all along, and allows you to grab all elements in a more tree-like fashion.

Another very useful XML parsing method, albeit a little more recent than these ones, and included in the JRE only since Java6, is StAX. StAX was conceived as a medial method between the tree-based of DOM and event-based approach of SAX. It is quite similar to SAX in the fact that parsing very large documents is easy, but in this case the application “pulls” info from the parser, instead of the parsing “pushing” events to the application. You can find more explanation on this subject here.

So, depending on what you want to achieve, you can use one of these approaches.