How to read an XML file with Java?

Answer 1

Since you want to parse config files, I think commons-configuration would be the best solution.

Commons Configuration provides a generic configuration interface which enables a Java application to read configuration data from a variety of sources (including XML)

Answer 2

There are several XML parsers for Java. One I've used and found particularly developer friendly is JDOM. And by developer friendly, I mean "java oriented" (i.e., you work with objects in your program), instead of "document oriented", as some other tools are.

Answer 3

You could use a simple DOM parser to read the xml representation.

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
dom = db.parse("config.xml");

Answer 4

I like jdom:

SAXBuilder parser = new SAXBuilder();
Document docConfig = parser.build("config.xml");
Element elConfig = docConfig.getRootElement();
String host = elConfig.getChildText("host");

Answer 5

For a similar use case in my application I used JaxB. With Jaxb, reading XML files is like interacting with Java POJOs. But to use JAXB you need to have the xsd for this xml file. You can look for more info here

Answer 6

I would recommend Commons Digester, which allows you to parse a file without writing reams of code. It uses a series of rules to determine what action is should perform when encountering a given element or attribute (a typical rule might be to create a particular business object).

Answer 7

If you want to be able to read and write objects to XML directly, you can use XStream

Answer 8

you can try http://code.google.com/p/jlibs/wiki/SAX2JavaBinding

Answer 9

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/