Reading an
XML file
- Start with a DocumentBuilder object that you get from the DocumentBuilderFactory.
- Use the setValidating method of DocumentBuilderFactory if you want to have the resulting builder validate your XML. This is false by default. There are a number of other options you can set with methods like this. See the API documentation for details.
- Now, you can get a reference to a File, URL, or InputStream, send it to the parse method of DocumentBuilder, and get your Document back.
- The document object that results is a representation of your XML document.
- getDocumentElement returns an Element which represents the root element of the document. Interface Element extends interface Node.
- We can get, set, and remove attributes with an Element object.
- We can get children Nodes from the root element with the getChildNodes method of the Node interface. This returns a NodeList, which is essentially a collection of children nodes.
- NodeList has two simple methods - getLength and item.
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
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