Inside XML

Creating a Parser

This first XML for Java example will get us started by parsing an XML document and displaying the number of a certain element in it. In this chapter, I'm taking a look at using the XML DOM with Java, and I'll use the XML for Java DOMParser class, which creates a W3C DOM tree as its output.

The document we'll parse is one we've seen before—customer.xml:

 <?xml version = "1.0" standalone="yes"?> <DOCUMENT> <CUSTOMER> <NAME> <LAST_NAME>Smith</LAST_NAME> <FIRST_NAME>Sam</FIRST_NAME> </NAME> <DATE>October 15, 2001</DATE> <ORDERS> <ITEM> <PRODUCT>Tomatoes</PRODUCT> <NUMBER>8</NUMBER> <PRICE>$1.25</PRICE> </ITEM> <ITEM> <PRODUCT>Oranges</PRODUCT> <NUMBER>24</NUMBER> <PRICE>$4.98</PRICE> </ITEM> </ORDERS> </CUSTOMER> <CUSTOMER> <NAME> ...