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

Note

DOM Parser is slow and consume a lot 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.

If you want to compare different implementation between DOM and SAX, Please visit this article – How to read XML file in Java – (SAX Parser)

Let’s start to see a DOM parser example.

<?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>

A Java class to read the 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();    
 }
 
}

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
This article was posted in Java category.