Retrieve content by string parameter in XML DOM

Question

I wonder if there is an already existing system out there that does the following:

Consider a well-formed XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


<root>
    <test>
    <name>Test</name>
    <complex>
        <value>Hello</value>
    </complex>
    </test>
</root>

Now what I want to do is retrieve "Hello" for example like this:

aSuitableClass.getString("test.complex.value");

I have made a small library that does this for JSON but I want to know if there is something like this for XML already out there. I know of XPath but that's not what I want because it uses "/" and so on.

If I had to make this myself I would assume DOM is the easiest for this as it is already in a tree structure. I would just have to create a string mapping.

So... `"test.complex.value".replaceAll("\\.", "/")` and then use XPath?! — Adrian Leonhard, Feb 28 '15 at 20:01
I did think of that! I just didn't know if it would work exactly the way I wanted. — Limnic, Feb 28 '15 at 20:06

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

1

If you want to do something like

aSuitableClass.getString("test.complex.value");

you could replace the '.' characters to '/' and convert your query to an XPath expression in the getString method. I think that's your simplest option. Here's an example of XPath How to read XML using XPath in Java

edited May 23 '17 at 11:50

Community

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answered Feb 28 '15 at 20:09

Balint Domokos

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Retrieve content by string parameter in XML DOM

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