👀 Views: 1780 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

xml java parsing

I just started working with I'm migrating some code and I'm working on a Java project where I need to parse an XML document containing mixed content (text and child elements) with attributes. The XML structure looks something like this: ```xml <book title="Effective Java"> <author>Joshua Bloch</author> <description>This book covers best practices for programming in Java.</description> <reviews> <review rating="5">Excellent insights!</review> <review rating="4">Very useful.</review> </reviews> </book> ``` I’m using the `javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder` to parse the XML and `org.w3c.dom` to navigate through it. My goal is to extract the title, author, description, and review ratings. However, I’m encountering an issue where the `description` text is being parsed as multiple text nodes rather than a single cohesive string. Here’s the code I have implemented: ```java import org.w3c.dom.*; import javax.xml.parsers.*; import java.io.File; public class XMLParser { public static void main(String[] args) { try { File inputFile = new File("books.xml"); DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = dBuilder.parse(inputFile); doc.getDocumentElement().normalize(); NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("book"); for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) { Node nNode = nList.item(temp); if (nNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) { Element eElement = (Element) nNode; String title = eElement.getAttribute("title"); String author = eElement.getElementsByTagName("author").item(0).getTextContent(); String description = eElement.getElementsByTagName("description").item(0).getTextContent(); System.out.println("Title: " + title); System.out.println("Author: " + author); System.out.println("Description: " + description); NodeList reviews = eElement.getElementsByTagName("review"); for (int j = 0; j < reviews.getLength(); j++) { Element review = (Element) reviews.item(j); String rating = review.getAttribute("rating"); System.out.println("Review (Rating: " + rating + "): " + review.getTextContent()); } } } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } ``` When I run this code, I get the correct title and author, but the `description` prints as an unexpected concatenated string of text nodes if there are any child elements within `description`. For instance, if my XML was like this: ```xml <description>This book covers <b>best practices</b> for programming in Java.</description> ``` It results in `This book covers best practices for programming in Java.` instead of the expected formatted output. I want to maintain the text structure while also extracting attributes correctly. Is there a way to handle mixed content properly in Java while parsing XML? Any guidance or examples would be greatly appreciated! This is for a application running on CentOS. Has anyone dealt with something similar?