Is there an easier way to parse XML in Java?

Question

I\'m trying to figure out how to parse some XML (for an Android app), and it seems pretty ridiculous how difficult it is to do in Java. It seems like it requires creating an

Answer 1

A couple of weeks ago I battered out a small library (a wrapper around javax.xml.stream.XMLEventReader) allowing one to parse XML in a similar fashion to a hand-written recursive descent parser. The source is available on github, and a simple usage example is below. Unfortunately Android doesn't support this API but it is very similar to the XmlPullParser API, which is supported, and porting wouldn't be too time-consuming.

accept("tilesets");
    while (atTag("tileset")) {
        String filename = attrib("file");
        File tilesetFile = new File(filename);
        if (!tilesetFile.isAbsolute()) {
            tilesetFile = new File(FilenameUtils.concat(file.getParent(), filename));
        }
        int tilesize = Integer.valueOf(attrib("tilesize"));
        Tileset t = new Tileset(tilesetFile, tilesize);
        t.setID(attrib("id"));
        tilesets.add(t);

        accept();
        close();
    }
close();

expect("map");

int width       = Integer.valueOf(attrib("width"));
int height      = Integer.valueOf(attrib("height"));
int tilesize    = Integer.valueOf(attrib("tilesize"));