A Simple API for Parsing XML in Java

You can do a lot with XML, but often all you want to do is to read a simple file with some basic data in it. The options for doing this, SAX, DOM and JAXB are all relatively verbose and often off-putting. I’ve devised a simple XML API for parsing simple XML files in Java. Parsing a file such as:

<config>
	<title>test</title>
	<version
		major="1"
		minor="2"/>
	<roles>
		<role name="admin"/>
		<role name="user"/>
	</roles>
	<users>
		<user name="joe" password="pass" role="admin"/>
		<user name="harry" password="secret" role="user" email="harry@me.com"/>
	</users>
	<test/>
</config>

Can be achieved with the following code:

Xml config = new Xml("config.xml","config"); 
		
System.out.println("title: "+config.child("title").content());

Xml version = config.child("version");
System.out.println("version: "+version.integer("major")+"."+version.integer("minor"));

for(Xml role:config.child("roles").children("role")) 
	System.out.println("role: name: "+role.string("name"));

for(Xml user:config.child("users").children("user")) {
	String email = user.optString("email");
	System.out.println(
		"user: name: "+user.string("name")+
		", password: "+user.string("password")+
		", role: "+user.string("role")+
		", email: "+(email==null ? "-" : email));
}

System.out.println("test: "+config.option("test"));

Output:

title: test
version: 1.2
role: name: admin
role: name: user
user: name: joe, password: pass, role: admin, email: -
user: name: harry, password: secret, role: user, email: harry@me.com
test: true

As you can see, it’s nice and simple and allows you to get to the information quickly and without any hassle. The API uses the DOM parser underneath, but attempts to make the data more easily available. All you need is this class, which you can of course customise however you like.