Get XML only immediate children elements by name

Question

I realise you found something of a solution to this in May @kentcdodds but I just had a fairly similar problem which I’ve now found, I think (perhaps in my usecase, but not in yours), a solution to.

a very simplistic example of my XML format is shown below:-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rels>
    <relationship num="1">
        <relationship num="2">
            <relationship num="2.1"/>
            <relationship num="2.2"/>
        </relationship>
    </relationship>
    <relationship num="1.1"/>
    <relationship num="1.2"/>

</rels>

As you can hopefully see from this snippet, the format I want can have N-levels of nesting for [relationship] nodes, so obviously the problem I had with Node.getChildNodes() was that I was getting all nodes from all levels of the hierarchy, and without any sort of hint as to Node depth.

Looking at the API for a while , I noticed there are actually two other methods that might be of some use:-

Node.getFirstChild()
Node.getNextSibling()

Together, these two methods seemed to offer everything that was required to get all of the immediate descendant elements of a Node. The following jsp code should give a fairly basic idea of how to implement this. Sorry for the JSP. I’m rolling this into a bean now but didn’t have time to create a fully working version from picked apart code.

<%@page import="javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory,
                javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder,
                org.w3c.dom.Document,
                org.w3c.dom.NodeList,
                org.w3c.dom.Node,
                org.w3c.dom.Element,
                java.io.File" %><% 
try {

    File fXmlFile = new File(application.getRealPath("https://stackoverflow.com/") + "/utils/forms-testbench/dom-test/test.xml");
    DocumentBuilderFactory dbFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder dBuilder = dbFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = dBuilder.parse(fXmlFile);
    doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

    Element docEl = doc.getDocumentElement();       
    Node childNode = docEl.getFirstChild();     
    while( childNode.getNextSibling()!=null ){          
        childNode = childNode.getNextSibling();         
        if (childNode.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {         
            Element childElement = (Element) childNode;             
            out.println("NODE num:-" + childElement.getAttribute("num") + "<br/>\n" );          
        }       
    }

} catch (Exception e) {
    out.println("ERROR:- " + e.toString() + "<br/>\n");
}

%>

This code would give the following output, showing only direct child elements of the initial root node.

NODE num:-1
NODE num:-1.1
NODE num:-1.2

Hope this helps someone anyway. Cheers for the initial post.

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