Getting the elements of a tag

Question

Hello everyone,
I want to get the text values of a tag in an XML file and save them in an arraylist.I use the DOM parseer to do that. Here is my source code:
private void display(Node node, ArrayList al){
if (node == null) {
return ;
int type = node.getNodeType();
switch (type) {
case Node.ELEMENT_NODE: {
int length = (node.getAttributes() != null) ? node.getAttributes().getLength() : 0;
NodeList childNodes = node.getChildNodes();
if (childNodes != null) {
length = childNodes.getLength();
for (int loopIndex = 0; loopIndex < length; loopIndex++ ) {
display(childNodes.item(loopIndex), al);
break;
case Node.TEXT_NODE: {
                    if(!node.getNodeValue().trim().equals("")){
                         al.add(node.getNodeValue().trim());
break;
The problem is: when a child element is empty, I want to add an empty string to the arrayList al (""). May be you'll say change the if statement. But if I do that I will also get the elements after the end tag of an element.
For example: if I have
<Parent>
<child1>kid1</child1>
<child2>kid2</child2>
<child3>kid3</child3>
</parent>
my arraylist will look like after print
kid1
kid2
kid3
but when I have:
<Parent>
<child1>kid1</child1>
<child2>kid2</child2>kid22
<child3></child3>
</parent>
kid1
kid2
kid22
what I want is:
kid1
kid2
(empty string)
What I am doing wrong or what should I do to resolve that?
Thanks

Answer 1

Quite a few things I did not understand in your code.
You have a source like
<parent>
<child1>kid1</child1>
<child2>kid2</child2>
<child3>kid3</child3>
</parent>
Why is that? Did you mean
<parent>
<child>kid1</child>
<child>kid2</child>
<child>kid3</child>
</parent>
Then you could enumerate contents of tag child like:
org.w3c.dom.NodeList list = doc.getElementsByTagName("child");Better yet if you fetched information using XPath functionality,
like:
list =  org.apache.xpath.XPathAPI.selectNodeList(doc, "parent/*");Kullervo