JDom Recursion Bugging me!!

Question

Developers,
5 dukes for the correct anwer. I asked my manager and he couldnt figure this out so here goes. A simple recursion problem - or so you might think.
JDom only allows one level deep serach for a tag name - no problem - so i wrote a recursive method which looks for a tag no matter how many levels deep. Here is the code
public void getParentNode(Element element) {
     if(element.getName().equals("content")){
          System.out.println("RETURNED");
                   return  parentElement ;
     List content = element.getContent();
     Iterator iterator = content.iterator();
     while (iterator.hasNext()) {
          Object o = iterator.next();
          if (o instanceof Element) {
               Element child = (Element) o;
               return (getParentNode(child));
return null;
}I watched this in the debugger and it kept hitting the retrun null and also retrun the 'parentElement'. The tag is DEFINITEL in the xml file.
I have no idea what to do - I am thinking or ripping out all the JDom references and using Xceres DOM - but this will be a pain.
What have i done wrong?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Instaed of iterating over the nodes select the node with an xpath expression.
import org.jdom.xpath.*;
File xmlDocument;
SAXBuilder saxBuilder=new SAXBuilder("org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser");
org.jdom.Document jdomDocument=saxBuilder.build(xmlDocument);
org.jdom.Attribute contentNode=(XPath.selectSingleNode(jdomDocument,"//content");