Parsing XML in Java

Question

i have response structure that i want to parse in Java. Can anyone help me with this?

    <message_response xmlns="">
      <action name="GETCIL">
        <param name="bookingNote" value="" require="" read-only=""><![CDATA[bookingNote]]></param>
        <param name="CarrierLinkType" value="" require="" read-only=""><![CDATA[True]]></param>
        <param name="Carrier" value="" require="" read-only=""><![CDATA[SK185]]></param>

 <param_list name="ViaAddressList" id="GETCIL">
      <value>
        <param_list name="ViaAddressId" id="ViaAddressList">
          <value><![CDATA[877765050_5511]]></value>
        </param_list>
        <param_list name="AddressDate" id="ViaAddressList">
          <value><![CDATA[10/12/2010]]></value>
        </param_list>
        <param_list name="AddressTime" id="ViaAddressList">
          <value><![CDATA[12:12]]></value>
        </param_list>
      </value>
    </param_list>


</action>
    </message_response>

There are tons of ways of parsing XML in Java and there are tons of questions about it here. In order to get a good answer you should be a lot more specific of what you want to do with the XML. Convert it to object tree? Extract a few selected values? Transform it to some other format? — Joachim Sauer
– Joachim Sauer, Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 8:42
Voting for reopen because the xml was in the question but not visible, because it wasn't formatted as code. — Andreas Dolk
– Andreas Dolk, Commented Apr 26, 2011 at 8:50

Nick Holt · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-26 09:39:20Z

3

The easiest way to extract specific values from an XML document (as opposed to parsing the complete document with SAX) is to use XPath as follows:

//1. load the document into memory.
DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();

//2. Create an XPath.
XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();

//3. Evaluate the xpath expression.
String actionName = xpath.evaluate("/message_response/action/@name", documentBuilder.parse(xmlFile));

There's not much more to it other than the XPath.evaluate method is overloaded in order to allow nodes and node lists to be returned (see javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants for the types).

Then you just need to read-up on the xpath syntax (http://www.w3schools.com/xpath/xpath_syntax.asp).

answered Apr 26, 2011 at 9:39

Nick Holt

34.5k4 gold badges55 silver badges64 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

AndroidDev Over a year ago

Thanks for this. Very helpfull indeed. I see how /message_response/action/param[11] gives you an 11th param in the list. Could you please help me in the Nested <param-list> could not find any example for that. I have updated the XML. Thank you so much

Nick Holt Over a year ago

You can do something like:

NodeList viaAddressList = (NodeList)xpath.evaluate("/message_response/param_list[@name=\"ViaAddressList\"]/value/param_list", documentBuilder.parse(xmlFile), XPathConstants.NodeList);

duffymo · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-26 09:26:16Z

1

Why the CDATA sections around the data?

You can use SAX or DOM to parse XML.

There are also libraries wrapping SAX and DOM parsers that make your life easier for common tasks. Two that come to mind for Java are JDOM and DOM4J. Google for them - there are tutorials and examples available that will show you what you need to know.

answered Apr 26, 2011 at 9:26

duffymo

310k46 gold badges376 silver badges570 bronze badges

1 Comment

AndroidDev Over a year ago

This is the format i recieve the data in. Could you please give me some code to iterate over. I am new to this . Thanks.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Parsing XML in Java

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

1 Comment

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

2 Comments

1 Comment

Linked

Related