Element casting problem in XML

Question

I'm having trouble reading an XML document.. When I have a NodeList and get its childnodes with the method getChildNodes(), the resulting NodeList is unable to cast items to Element using the item()-method. If I try to read a certain group of elements using getElementsByTagName() the NodeList casts items to Element just fine. What am I doing wrong? Am I perhaps using the wrong method? I have posted an example below:
This listing works just fine:
Element element = (Element) nodes.item(0);
NodeList innerNodeList = element.getElementsByTagName("spot");
Element element1 = (Element) innerNodeList.item(0);
While this one throws "Exception in thread "Thread-2" java.lang.ClassCastException: com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.DeferredTextImpl":
Element element = (Element) nodes.item(0);
NodeList innerNodeList = element.getChildNodes();
Element element1 = (Element) innerNodeList.item(0);

Answer 1

While this one throws "Exception in thread "Thread-2"
java.lang.ClassCastException:
com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.dom.DeferredTextImpl
Element element = (Element) nodes.item(0);
NodeList innerNodeList = element.getChildNodes();
Element element1 = (Element) innerNodeList.item(0);The NodeList returned by getChildNodes contains all children of the element including text nodes.
I.e. consider the following xml:<td>some text<p>more text</p>yet more text</td>The td element will have three children: a text node representing "some text", an element node for the p element, and a text node representing "yet more text".
The good thing is that all objects in a NodeList are instances of org.w3c.Node, so you can use its getNodeType method to determine its type and then use the appropriate cast:Element element = (Element) nodes.item(0);
NodeList innerNodeList = element.getChildNodes();
Element element1;
if (innerNodeList.item(0).getNodeType() == Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
  element1 = (Element) innerNodeList.item(0);
}Usually you will end up with code like this:private void handleNodes( NodeList nl )
  final int length = nl.getLength();
  for ( int k = 0; k < length; ++k )
     final Node node = nl.item( k );
     switch ( node.getNodeType() )
        case Node.ELEMENT_NODE:
           handleElement( (Element)node );
           break;
        case Node.TEXT_NODE:
           handleText( (Text)node );
           break;
        default:
           // ignore all other node types
}