Using Java to parse XML

Question

I have made a PHP script that parses an XML file. This is not easy to use and I wanted to implement it in Java.

Inside the first element there are various count of

Answer 1

DOM Parser through Recursion

Using a DOM parser, you can easily get into a mess of nested for loops as you've already pointed out. Nevertheless, DOM structure is represented by Node containing child nodes collection in the form of a NodeList where each element is again a Node - this becomes a perfect candidate for recursion.

Sample XML

To showcase the ability of DOM parser discounting the size of the XML, I took the example of a hosted sample OpenWeatherMap XML.

Searching by city name in XML format

This XML contains London's weather forecast for every 3 hour duration. This XML makes a good case of reading through a relatively large data set and extracting specific information through attributes within the child elements.

In the snapshot, we are targeting to gather the Elements marked by the arrows.

The Code

We start of by creating a Custom class to hold temperature and clouds values. We would also override toString() of this custom class to conveniently print our records.

ForeCast.java

public class ForeCast {

    /**
     * Overridden toString() to conveniently print the results
     */
    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "The minimum temperature is: " + getTemperature()
                + " and the weather overall: " + getClouds();
    }

    public String getTemperature() {
        return temperature;
    }

    public void setTemperature(String temperature) {
        this.temperature = temperature;
    }

    public String getClouds() {
        return clouds;
    }

    public void setClouds(String clouds) {
        this.clouds = clouds;
    }

    private String temperature;
    private String clouds;
}

Now to the main class. In the main class where we perform our recursion, we want to create a List of ForeCast objects which store individual temperature and clouds records by traversing the entire XML.

// List collection which is would hold all the data parsed through the XML
// in the format defined by the custom type 'ForeCast'
private static List forecastList = new ArrayList<>();

In the XML the parent to both temperature and clouds elements is time, we would logically check for the time element.

/**
 * Logical block
 */
// As per the XML syntax our 2 fields temperature and clouds come
// directly under the Node/Element time
if (node.getNodeName().equals("time")
        && node.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
    // Instantiate our custom forecast object
    forecastObj = new ForeCast();
    Element timeElement = (Element) node;

Thereafter, we would get a handle on temperature and clouds elements which can be set to the ForeCast object.

    // Get the temperature element by its tag name within the XML (0th
    // index known)
    Element tempElement = (Element) timeElement.getElementsByTagName("temperature").item(0);
    // Minimum temperature value is selectively picked (for proof of concept)
    forecastObj.setTemperature(tempElement.getAttribute("min"));

    // Similarly get the clouds element
    Element cloudElement = (Element) timeElement.getElementsByTagName("clouds").item(0);
    forecastObj.setClouds(cloudElement.getAttribute("value"));

The complete class below:

CustomDomXmlParser.java

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

public class CustomDomXmlParser {

    // List collection which is would hold all the data parsed through the XML
    // in the format defined by the custom type 'ForeCast'
    private static List forecastList = new ArrayList<>();

    public static void main(String[] args) throws ParserConfigurationException,
            SAXException, IOException {
        // Read XML throuhg a URL (a FileInputStream can be used to pick up an
        // XML file from the file system)
        InputStream path = new URL(
                "http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?q=London,us&mode=xml")
                .openStream();

        DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        Document document = builder.parse(path);

        // Call to the recursive method with the parent node
        traverse(document.getDocumentElement());

        // Print the List values collected within the recursive method
        for (ForeCast forecastObj : forecastList)
            System.out.println(forecastObj);

    }

    /**
     * 
     * @param node
     */
    public static void traverse(Node node) {
        // Get the list of Child Nodes immediate to the current node
        NodeList list = node.getChildNodes();

        // Declare our local instance of forecast object
        ForeCast forecastObj = null;

        /**
         * Logical block
         */
        // As per the XML syntax our 2 fields temperature and clouds come
        // directly under the Node/Element time
        if (node.getNodeName().equals("time")
                && node.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {

            // Instantiate our custom forecast object
            forecastObj = new ForeCast();
            Element timeElement = (Element) node;

            // Get the temperature element by its tag name within the XML (0th
            // index known)
            Element tempElement = (Element) timeElement.getElementsByTagName(
                    "temperature").item(0);
            // Minimum temperature value is selectively picked (for proof of
            // concept)
            forecastObj.setTemperature(tempElement.getAttribute("min"));

            // Similarly get the clouds element
            Element cloudElement = (Element) timeElement.getElementsByTagName(
                    "clouds").item(0);
            forecastObj.setClouds(cloudElement.getAttribute("value"));
        }

        // Add our foreCastObj if initialized within this recursion, that is if
        // it traverses the time node within the XML, and not in any other case
        if (forecastObj != null)
            forecastList.add(forecastObj);

        /**
         * Recursion block
         */
        // Iterate over the next child nodes
        for (int i = 0; i < list.getLength(); i++) {
            Node currentNode = list.item(i);
            // Recursively invoke the method for the current node
            traverse(currentNode);

        }

    }
}

The Output

As you can figure out from the screenshot below, we were able to group together the 2 specific elements and assign their values effectively to a Java Collection instance. We delegated the complex parsing of the xml to the generic recursive solution and customized mainly the logical block part. As mentioned, it is a genetic solution with a minimal customization which can work through all valid xmls.

Alternatives

Many other alternatives are available, here is a list of open source XML parsers for Java.

However, your approach with PHP and your initial work with Java based parser aligns to the DOM based XML parser solution, simplified by the use of recursion.