DOM XML How to get child node?

I have xml like this:

<param>
  <name>some_list</name>
  <value>
    <items>
      <item>
        <value>7</value>
        <type>Long</type>
      </item>
      <item>
        <value>23</value>
        <type>String</type>
      </item>
      <item>
        <value>1.0</value>
        <type>Double</type>
      </item>
      <item>
        <value>true</value>
        <type>Boolean</type>
      </item>
      <item>
        <value>13-01-2014 16:03:50</value>
        <type>Date</type>
      </item>
      <item>
        <value>[7, false]</value>
        <type>String</type>
      </item>
    </items>
  </value>
  <type>Collection</type>
</param>

I need to get value of type node - child od param node (in this case 'Collection'). I am not interested children of item nodes, so solution like this:

NodeList nodes = element.getElementsByTagName("type").item(0).getChildNodes();
Node node = (Node) nodes.item(0);
return node.getNodeValue();

is wrong (it returns 'Long', not 'Collection'!)

Jon Skeet
people
quotationmark

getElementsByTagName returns all descendant elements. You just want all immediate child elements.

You can use getChildNodes() and then filter them if you want. For example:

NodeList children = element.getChildNodes();
for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++) {
    Node node = children.item(i);
    if (node.getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_TYPE
        && node.getLocalName().equals("type")) {
        // Use the node, get its value etc
    }
}

You might want to look at using XPath or an alternative Java XML API (e.g. JDOM) to make this simpler, too. If you do the above a lot, you probably want to extract it to a helper method to return all the direct children with a particular element name (or just the first one).

people

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