With this example we are going to demonstrate how to find elements by absolute location in XPath. The XPath language provides a simple, concise syntax for selecting nodes from an XML document. In short, to find elements by absolute location in XPath you should:
- Obtain a new instance of a DocumentBuilderFactory, that is a factory API that enables applications to obtain a parser that produces DOM object trees from XML documents.
- Set the parser produced so as not to validate documents as they are parsed, using
setValidating(boolean validating)API method of DocumentBuilderFactory, with validating set to false. - Create a new instance of a DocumentBuilder, using
newDocumentBuilder()API method of DocumentBuilderFactory. - Parse the FileInputStream with the content to be parsed, using
parse(InputStream is)API method of DocumentBuilder. This method parses the content of the given InputStream as an XML document and returns a new DOM Document object. - Create an XPathFactory instance to be used to create XPath objects, with
newInstance()API method of XPathFactory. - Create a new XPath object, using the underlying object model determined when the XPathFactory was instantiated, with
newXPath()API method of XPathFactory. - Create a String expression and use
evaluate(String expression, Object item, QName returnType)API method of XPath in order to evaluate it in the specified Document object. The method returns a result as the specified type. - In the example first we are searching for the root element. Then we are searching for the root element, using its name. We are also searching for the element under the root element. In these cases the returnType is set to
XPathConstants.NODE, and the Node containing the specified element will be returned. Furthermore, we are using expressions to search for all elements under a specified path or search for elements in the document except a specific one. We can also search for elements that have at least one child element or search for elements with a specified level, starting with level one to be the the level of root. In these cases the returnType is set to XPathConstants.NODESET, and a NodeList is returned, that is a collection of the Nodes containing the specified content.
Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:
package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
public class FindElementsByAbsoluteLocationWithXPath {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbf.setValidating(false);
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(new FileInputStream(new File("in.xml")));
XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();
String expression;
Node node;
NodeList nodeList;
// 1. root element
expression = "/*";
node = (Node) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODE);
System.out.println("1. " + node.getNodeName());
// 2. root element (by name)
expression = "/rss";
node = (Node) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODE);
System.out.println("2. " + node.getNodeName());
// 3. element under rss
expression = "/rss/channel";
node = (Node) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODE);
System.out.println("3. " + node.getNodeName());
// 4. all elements under rss/channel
expression = "/rss/channel/*";
nodeList = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
System.out.print("4. ");
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.print(nodeList.item(i).getNodeName() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
// 5. all title elements in the document
expression = "//title";
nodeList = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
System.out.print("5. ");
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.print(nodeList.item(i).getNodeName() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
// 6. all elements in the document except title
expression = "//*[name() != 'title']";
nodeList = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
System.out.print("6. ");
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.print(nodeList.item(i).getNodeName() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
// 7. all elements with at least one child element
expression = "//*[*]";
nodeList = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
System.out.print("7. ");
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.print(nodeList.item(i).getNodeName() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
// 8. all level-5 elements (the root being at level 1)
expression = "/*/*/*/*";
nodeList = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(expression, doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
System.out.print("8. ");
for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.print(nodeList.item(i).getNodeName() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
}
}
Input:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Java Tutorials and Examples 2</title> <language>en-us</language> <item> <title><![CDATA[Java Tutorials 2]]></title> <link>http://www.javacodegeeks.com/</link> </item> <item> <title><![CDATA[Java Examples 2]]></title> <link>http://examples.javacodegeeks.com/</link> </item> </channel> </rss>
Output:
1. rss
2. rss
3. channel
4. title language item item
5. title title title
6. rss channel language item link item link
7. rss channel item item
8. title link title link
This was an example of how to find elements by absolute location in XPath in Java.
