Simple way to extract data from XML with Java

Question

What would be the simplest way to extract data from XML in Java? The XML data is always in the form:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>
<groups>GROUPNAME</groups>

and all I want to do is capture the groupname in a string. I've tried using a regular expression, but I'm struggleing to write the pattern code:

String xmlline = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<groups>XWiki.G_SW_DEV</groups>";
String pattern = "";
Pattern r = Pattern.compile(pattern);
Matcher m = r.matcher(xmlline);
if(m.find()){
    ....                     
}

As described in: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/java_regular_expressions.htm

Any advice on the pattern code or is there a better way to extract the XML data?

Answer 1

Classical advice: dont use regex. It seems easy at begining, but it's not so easy.

and there are many classical libraries for XML which do it well !

see this: Java:XML Parser

and then, you only need to do this to retrieve elements:

doc.getElementsByTagName("groups")

getElementsByTagName

and, something like that

doc.getElementsByTagName("method").item(0).getTextContent()