Is there an easy way to read an XML file in Java? [closed]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.

Closed 7 years ago.

Improve this question

I'm fairly new to Java and am writing an app that needs an XML 开发者_开发知识库config file. The problem I have is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do this, which seems a bit strange. I've looked SAX and DOM and both seem quite complicated. Are there any other good API's out there? What's the best way to do this in Java? Thanks...

---

I've written a very simple API for precisely this reason. It uses the DOM parser underneath, but exposes a very simple and easy-to-use API that allows you to get to the XML data really easily. It's just a single Java file that you can use as a library in your code. Hope that helps.

http://argonrain.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/000/

---

I would recommend the Commons Configuration library: http://commons.apache.org/configuration/index.html Take a look at the HOWTOs to see how easy it is to get some information from an XML file.

All other libs I know involve either operating on the DOM directly or registering handlers for SAX parsing (which both involve a high overhead of code). JAXB is also an alternative but doesn't involve less overhead code than the former two.

Max

---

You could take a look into that list for xml serializers and deserializers.

I would suggest the jdk class XmlEncoder+XmlDecoder, xstream or simple.

---

This is what you need, powerful and easy to use.

Preferences API

---

"I'm fairly new to Java ... there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do this, which seems a bit strange." This is an old post. Now that you've been using Java for 4 years, are you still surprised when it's hard to do simple things? :)

I started with the JDK, and built my own XmlHelper class on top of it. It's small and simple. Every time I find myself writing the same code over and over, it gets copied into that class. It's made my life a lot easier. http://marketmovers.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-easy-way-to-read-xml-in-java.html

---

SAX and DOM are the "Standard" ways to approach parsing an XML file in Java.

There are alternatives to XML too.

Perhaps all you need is a properties file ?

Have you considered JSON?

---

A nice alternative to parsing the file yourself (especially for configuration purposes) is to use Apache Commons Digester.

You simply nominate what parts of the XML file will trigger which setters/methods you require, and Digester will do the rest. You can build arbitrarily complex configurations and the 'parsing' code remains trivial.

e.g.

  digester.addObjectCreate( "addresses/address", Address.class );
  digester.addBeanPropertySetter( "addresses/address/addressLine1", "addressLine1" );

creates an Address object and sets the first line of the address. See this tutorial for more info.

Alternatively XStream offers (possibly) the simplest XML-to-object conversion available in Java. To create an instance of a (say) Configuration class from an input stream is a one-line operation.