Get child Node of another Node, given node name

Question

I have an XML like this:

<documentslist>   <document>     <docnumber>1</docnumber>     <docname>Declaration of Human Rights</docname>     <aoo>lib</aoo>   </document>   <document>     <docnumber>2</docnumber>     <docname>Fair trade</docname>     <aoo>lib</aoo>   </document>   <document>     <docnumber>3</docnumber>     <docname>The wars for water</docname>     <aoo>lib</aoo>   </document>   <!-- etc. --> </documentslist> 

I have this code:

//XML parsing Document docsDoc = null; try {     DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();     docsDoc = db.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlWithDocs))); } catch(ParserConfigurationException e) {e.printStackTrace();} catch(SAXException e) {e.printStackTrace();} catch(IOException e) {e.printStackTrace();} //retrieve document elements NodeList docs = docsDoc.getElementsByTagName("document");  if (docs.getLength() > 0){     //print a row for each document     for (int i=0; i<docs.getLength(); i++){         //get current document         Node doc = docs.item(i);         //print a cell for some document children         for (int j=0; j<columns.length; j++){             Node cell;             //print docname             cell = doc.getElementsByTagName("docname").item(0); //doesn't work             System.out.print(cell.getTextContent() + "\t");             //print aoo             cell = doc.getElementsByTagName("aoo").item(0); //doesn't work             System.out.print(cell.getTextContent() + "\t");         }         System.out.println();     } } 

But, as you know Node hasn't got getElementsByTagName method... Only Document has it. But I can't do docsDoc.getElementsByTagName("aoo"), because it will return me all <aoo> nodes, not only the one existing in the <document> node I'm inspecting.

How could I do it? Thanks!

Answer 1

If the Node is not just any node, but actually an Element (it could also be e.g. an attribute or a text node), you can cast it to Element and use getElementsByTagName.