To access the values id1 & id2 im iterating over every value in the XML and if I find a tag named id1 or id2 I read its value into a variable. Is there a better method of reading the values id1 & id2 ?
<begin> <total>1</total> <values> <factor> <base>test</base> <id1>id1</id1> <id2>id2</id2> <val>val2</val> <newval>val1</newval> </factor> </values> </begin> If you use XPath, you can extract values directly from the Document object. In your case, the XPath to get to id1 would be /begin/id1.
You can use the Java API for XML Processing. It's a very robust way of dealing with XML in Java.
Use a SAX parser and store the text emitted after the "id1" start element as the id1 value and the text after the "id2" start element as the id2 value.
For example:
public static List<String> getIds(InputStream xmlStream) throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException { final List<String> ids = new ArrayList<String>(); SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); SAXParser saxParser = factory.newSAXParser(); saxParser.parse(xmlStream, new DefaultHandler() { boolean getChars = false; public void startElement(String uri, String name, String qName, Attributes attrs) throws SAXException { if ("id1".equalsIgnoreCase(qName)) getChars = true; if ("id2".equalsIgnoreCase(qName)) getChars = true; } public void characters(char cs[], int start, int len) throws SAXException { if (getChars) { ids.add(new String(cs, start, len)); getChars = false; } } }); return ids; } You can use JDOM for doing this:
import org.jdom.Document; import org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder; public class Test { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception{ SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder(); Document doc = builder.build("test.xml"); String id1 = doc.getRootElement().getChild("values").getChild("factor").getChild("id1").getValue(); System.out.println(id1); String id2 = doc.getRootElement().getChild("values").getChild("factor").getChild("id2").getValue(); System.out.println(id2); } } 
