Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to read XML response from a URL in java?

I’m trying to read an XML file from my web server and display the contents of it on a ListView, so I’m reading the file like this:

File xml = new File("http://example.com/feed.xml");
DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = dBuilder.parse(xml);
doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

NodeList mainNode = doc.getElementsByTagName("article");
// for loop to populate the list...

The problem is that I’m getting this error:

java.io.FileNotFoundException: /http:/mydomainname.com/feed.xml (No such file or directory)

Why I’m having this problem and how to correct it?

Answer 1

File is meant to point to local files.

If you want to point to a remote URI, the easiest is to use the class url

 //modified code
 URL url = new URL("http://example.com/feed.xml");
 URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
 InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getInputStream());

 //your code
 DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
 DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
 Document doc = dBuilder.parse( in );

As you can see, later on, thanks to java streaming apis, you can easily adapt your code logic to work with the content of the file. This is due to an overload of the parse method in class DocumentBuilder.