Just Java™ 2

Reading XML With DOM Parsers

XML documents are just text files, so you could read and write them using ordinary file I/O. But you'd miss the benefits of XML if you did that. Valid XML documents have a lot of structure to them, and we want to read them in a way that lets us check their validity, and also preserve the information about what fields they have and how they are laid out.

What we need is a program that reads a flat XML file and generates a tree data structure in memory containing all the information from the file. Ideally, this program should be general enough to build that structure for all possible valid XML files. Processing an XML file is called “parsing” it. Parsing is the computer science term (borrowed from compiler terminology) ...