Find Level of Element in XML

[Mike Jeya]

Hi Guys,

I need to find the Level number of a Node in a XML file.
I am not able to track that.Can anyone help me out?

for ex:

<root>
<parent1>
<child1>
<child2>
</child2>
</child1>
</parent1>

<parent2>
<child21>
</child21>
</parent2>
<parent3>
</parent3>
</root>

I have to get the level of root as 0 and parent1, parent2 as 1 and child1,child21 as 2 etc..

Thanks in Advance

[Balaji Loganathan]

Originally posted by Mike Jeya:

I have to get the level of root as 0 and parent1, parent2 as 1 and child1,child21 as 2 etc..

Thanks in Advance

Have you tried position() function in XSLT (if you are using xslt)

[Lasse Koskela]

The position() function will not work but if you're using the DOM API, you can write a simple method like this:

public static int getLevel(Element element) {
    if (element.getParentNode().getNodeType() == DOCUMENT_NODE) {
        // if the node is the root node, return 0
        return 0;
    } else {
        // otherwise, return the parent node's level plus one
        return 1 + getLevel(element.getParentNode());
    }
}

Note that I didn't even compile the above, let alone write a unit test for it, so it might need some tweaking.