XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Name

childNodes: NodeList

Synopsis

Returns a NodeList containing a reference to every child of this Node.

Java binding

public NodeList getChildNodes( );

Java example

// List the text contents of an element
NodeList nlChildren = elem.getChildNodes( );
Node ndChild;
     
for (int iNode = 0; iNode < nlChildren.getLength( ); iNode++) {
    ndChild = nlChildren.item(iNode);
     
    if (ndChild.getNodeType( ) =  = Node.TEXT_NODE) {
        System.out.println(ndChild.getNodeValue( ));
    }
}

Dynamic Tree References

Throughout the DOM, several places return lists or collections of nodes that represent the current state of the document tree. These references are all live; any modifications to the document hierarcy, made by inserting or removing nodes, are reflected in the list immediately.

Whether due to multithreading or unforeseen side effects of procedure calls, the contents of the list being used could change. To reduce the likelihood of difficult-to-find bugs resulting from stale values, request values (such as the length of a list) directly from the NodeList or NamedNodeMap objects. This option is safer than storing values in intermediate variables.