getting the value of a node

[mark coleman]

Hi, I'm new to XML. I was going through Sun's tutorial and trying to parse a XML document using JAXP. This is my XML file.

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<test>
<person>
<name>Harpreet</name>
<Profession>Java</Profession>
</person>
</test>   

This is how i'm trying to parse it

DocumentBuilderFactory documentFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
File f = new File("C:\\testXML.xml");
try{
DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = documentFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
document = documentBuilder.parse(f);
System.out.println("Parsing successful");

Element e = document.getDocumentElement();
NodeList list = e.getChildNodes();
for(int i=0; i<list.getLength(); i++){
Node name = list.item(i);
NodeList forLoop = name.getChildNodes();
for(int a=0; a<forLoop.getLength(); a++){
Node forName = forLoop.item(a);
if(!forName.getNodeName().startsWith("#")){
System.out.println("name in NODE LIST is:  " + forName.getNodeName() + " value is: " + forName.getNodeValue());
}
}
}
}catch(Exception e){
System.out.println("ERROR: " + e.toString());
}
    

When i run the program, It does print the name of child node but doesn't print their value. Could someone please let me know how to fix it. Thanks for your time

[Paul Clapham]

Have a look at the API documentation for org.w3c.dom.Node and you will see a table that tells you what to expect as "name" and "value" for every type of node. You'll see, for example, that an Element node has a name (what you would expect) but it doesn't have a value.

What you have in your example XML is a bunch of Elements, and some of them have Text nodes as children. Don't expect that asking for the value of an Element will return the value of one or any or all of its child nodes. If you want the value of the Text node that's a child of an Element node, you have to write the code to get the Text node and ask for its value.