XPath, XML Namespaces and Java

Question

I\'ve spent the past day attempting to extract a one XML node out of the following document and am unable to grasp the nuances of XML Namespaces to make it work.

The

Answer 1

SAX (alternative to XPath) version:

SAXParser saxParser = SAXParserFactory.newInstance().newSAXParser();
final String[] number = new String[1];
DefaultHandler handler = new DefaultHandler()
{           
    @Override
    public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
    Attributes attributes) throws SAXException
    {
        if (qName.equals("documentnbr"))
            number[0] = attributes.getValue("number");
    }
};
saxParser.parse("input.xml", handler);
System.out.println(number[0]);

I see it's more complicated to use XPath with namespaces as it should be (my opinion). Here is my (simple) code:

XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();

NamespaceContextMap contextMap = new NamespaceContextMap();
contextMap.put("custom", "http://www.PureEdge.com/XFDL/Custom");
contextMap.put("designer", "http://www.PureEdge.com/Designer/6.1");
contextMap.put("pecs", "http://www.PureEdge.com/PECustomerService");
contextMap.put("xfdl", "http://www.PureEdge.com/XFDL/6.5");
contextMap.put("xforms", "http://www.w3.org/2003/xforms");
contextMap.put("", "http://www.PureEdge.com/XFDL/6.5");

xpath.setNamespaceContext(contextMap);
String expression = "//:documentnbr/@number";
InputSource inputSource = new InputSource("input.xml");
String number;
number = (String) xpath.evaluate(expression, inputSource, XPathConstants.STRING);
System.out.println(number);

You can get NamespaceContextMap class (not mine) from here (GPL license). There is also 6376058 bug.