Count XML Elements in Java using DOM parser example

In this example we are going to see how to count elements with specific tag names using a DOM parser in Java.

Basically all you have to do in order to count elements in an XML elements is:

• Open and parse an XML Document using a DocumentBuilder
• Use Document.getElementsByTagName that will return a list with nodes.
• Simply print out the length of the above list using getLength method.

Here is the XML file we are going to use as an input:
 
 
testFile.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><company>

	<employee id="10">

		<lastname>Harley</lastname>
        <email>james@example.org</email>
		<department>Human Resources</department>
		<salary>2000000</salary>
	    <address>34 Stanley St.</address>

	</employee>

	<employee id="2">
		<firstname>John</firstname>
		<lastname>May</lastname>
		<email>john@example.org</email>
		<department>Logistics</department>
		<salary>400</salary>
	</employee>

</company>

Let’s take a look at the code:

CountXMLElementJava.java:

package com.javacodegeeks.java.core;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

public class CountXMLElementJava {

	private static final String xmlfilepath = "C:\\Users\\nikos7\\Desktop\\filesForExamples\\testFile.xml";

	public static void main(String argv[]) {

		try {
			DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

			DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = documentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();

			Document document = documentBuilder.parse(xmlfilepath);

			NodeList nodeList = document.getElementsByTagName("employee");

			System.out.println("Number of elements with tag name employee : " + nodeList.getLength());

		} catch (ParserConfigurationException pce) {
			pce.printStackTrace();
		} catch (IOException ioe) {
			ioe.printStackTrace();
		} catch (SAXException sae) {
			sae.printStackTrace();
		}
	}
}

Output:

Number of elements with tag name employee : 2