Parsing XML (using the jakarta commons digester)

[Katrina Owen]

I've run into a snag with a file I am trying to parse.
The file has approximately 700 entries, most of which have the following structure:

<root>
  <attribute></attribute>
  ...
  <section>
    <score></score>
    ...
  </section>
  ...
</root>

Sometimes there will be multiple sections for a single root element, but overall, it follows that basic structure.

There is a small subset of these, approximately 30, that have an extra layer, like so:

<root>
  <attribute></attribute>
  ...
  <distinguishingFeature>
    <section>
      <score></score>
      ...
    </section>
    ...
  </distinguishingFeature>
  ...
</root>

For what I'm doing, I don't really need the distinguishing feature, I just want to get to the stuff it wraps.
Would it be completely off the mark to define an additional structure

root/distinguishingFeature/section/score

in addition to the structure that is already defined,

root/section/score

and which works for most of the cases?

Or do I need to approach this in a conceptually different manner?

[Ben Souther]

Every time I've used that parser, I've made the Java Object model match the structure of the XML document.

I'm not sure what the easiest way to skip a level would be.