Here’s an example to show you how to read a XML file in Java via DOM XML parser. The DOM interface is the easiest XML parser to understand, and use. It parses an entire XML document and load it into memory, modeling it with Object for easy traversal or manipulation.

Note
DOM Parser is slow and consume a lot of memory if it load a XML document which contains a lot of data. Please consider SAX parser as solution for it, SAX is faster than DOM and use less memory.

1. DOM Parser Example

A DOM XML parser read below XML file and print out each elements one by one.

File : file.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<company>
	<staff>
		<firstname>yong</firstname>
		<lastname>mook kim</lastname>
		<nickname>mkyong</nickname>
		<salary>100000</salary>
	</staff>
	<staff>
		<firstname>low</firstname>
		<lastname>yin fong</lastname>
		<nickname>fong fong</nickname>
		<salary>200000</salary>
	</staff>
</company>

File : ReadXMLFile.java – A Java class to read above XML file.

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import java.io.File;
 
public class ReadXMLFile {
 
	public static void main(String argv[]) {
 
	  try {
 
		File fXmlFile = new File("c:\\file.xml");
		DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
		DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
		Document doc = dBuilder.parse(fXmlFile);
		doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
 
		System.out.println("Root element :" + doc.getDocumentElement().getNodeName());
		NodeList nList = doc.getElementsByTagName("staff");
		System.out.println("-----------------------");
 
		for (int temp = 0; temp < nList.getLength(); temp++) {
 
		   Node nNode = nList.item(temp);
		   if (nNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
 
		      Element eElement = (Element) nNode;
 
		      System.out.println("First Name : " + getTagValue("firstname", eElement));
		      System.out.println("Last Name : " + getTagValue("lastname", eElement));
	              System.out.println("Nick Name : " + getTagValue("nickname", eElement));
		      System.out.println("Salary : " + getTagValue("salary", eElement));
 
		   }
		}
	  } catch (Exception e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	  }
  }
 
  private static String getTagValue(String sTag, Element eElement) {
	NodeList nlList = eElement.getElementsByTagName(sTag).item(0).getChildNodes();
 
        Node nValue = (Node) nlList.item(0);
 
	return nValue.getNodeValue();
  }
 
}

2. Result

Root element :company
-----------------------
First Name : yong
Last Name : mook kim
Nick Name : mkyong
Salary : 100000
First Name : low
Last Name : yin fong
Nick Name : fong fong
Salary : 200000
Note
You may interest ath this How to read XML file in Java – (SAX Parser), do compare and spot the different implementation between DOM and SAX parse.
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