Question

So I’m writing an android app that needs to grab book price data from the web. I found isbndb.com which seems to provide good reasourses and price comparison. The only issue is that their xml files are a bit complex.

I am new to parsing XML in Java and don’t know too much. I know how to parse basic xml files. With simple tags. I usually use the DocumentBuilder and the DocumentBuilderFactory However this is the part of the file which I’m trying to parse.

<Prices price_time="2012-04-08T20:05:49Z">
<Price store_isbn="" store_title="Discworld: Thief of Time" store_url="http://isbndb.com/x/book/thief_of_time/buy/isbn/ebay.html" store_id="ebay" currency_code="USD" is_in_stock="1" is_historic="0" check_time="2008-12-09T12:00:51Z" is_new="0" currency_rate="1" price="0.99"/>
<Price store_isbn="" store_title="" store_url="http://bookshop.blackwell.com/bobus/scripts/home.jsp?action=search&type=isbn&term=0061031321&source=1154376025" store_id="blackwell" currency_code="USD" is_in_stock="0" is_historic="0" is_new="1" check_time="2011-11-08T02:54:15Z" currency_rate="1" price="7.99"/> 
</Prices> 

What I am trying to do is grab the info in the attribute values such as store_isbn or store_title. If anyone could help me with this I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use the above mentioned link for parsing xml and For retrieving the attribute values you can use following.

    public void startElement(String uri, String localName,String qName, 
            Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {

    System.out.println("Start Element :" + attributes.getValue("store_title"));




}

attributes.getValue(“store_title”) method will be used for parsing attribute values. Hope it will help.