Best practice to parse xml file with same content but based on different schemas

I need to parse xml files from two sources. Both xml files contain the same content but each source uses their own schemas. This means the values that i want to extract from the xml file will be stored in different element names depending on the source of the file.

Here is an example - Assume i am only interested in the "name" of a product.

Source 1
-------------------------
    <item>
     <itemname>Camera</itemname>
     <itemprice>20</itemprice>
    </item>

Source 2
-------------------------
    <productList>
     <productName>Camera</productname>
     <ProductPrice>20</productprice>
    </productList>

To parse the above i have to know the source of the xml file and then either do a

getElementsByTagName("itemname");

or

getElementsByTagName("productName");开发者_StackOverflow社区

My original plan was to have a different parser for each source's xml file but i am thinking that maybe i could write a generic parser if i specify the path to the element i need. The benefit of this is that i can then process any xml file from any source without having to modify the parser.

What i am thinking of doing is to store the path to the element on to a properties file. i.e.

source1.name="itemname"
source2.name=productName

The generic parser would then just retrieve the element based on the name i provide it. This will probably work but i am thinking that if i am interested in more than one element it might be cumbersome to maintain it via a properties file.

Is there a better way to resolve the above? Please note that One restriction that i am limited to is that the target platform for this is JDK 1.4 so xpath etc would not work.

The ideal solution is XPath. No matter how different the XML inputs are, you can store an XPath for each as a string in a properties file. There are several XPath-compliant parsers that work with JDK 1.4.

If element names follow a convention (*Name, *Price), you could write a generic parsing function using wildcards and XPath. Or you could write it based on tag orders if they are always the same (you can do this without XPath).