XML sigh

Question

Hey, I've beening sitting here for 4 hours now staring at api's and online help guides about how to read in XML, maybe I'm just having bad luck. But this is what my XML document looks like.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Program>
<menu name="Selection1 abc="yes" required="yes" display="0">
<item name="Item 1"/>
<item name="Item 2"/>
<item name="Item 3"/>
<item name="Item 4"/>
<item name="Item 5"/>
<item name="Item 6"/>
</menu>
<menu name="Selection2" abc="yes" required="yes" display="0">
<item name="Item 1"/>
<item name="Item 2"/>
<item name="Item 3"/>
<item name="Item 4"/>
<item name="Item 5"/>
<item name="Item 6"/>
</menu>
</Program>
Except in the real one there are about 8900 lines of code :( So going through by hand and trying to change the format to look like how I see them in the tutorials will take forever.
The basic Idea is I want to be able in the final project pick something in a gui and have it call a class and will tell it to search the xml document and pull up all of the Item 1..2..3.etc's contained under which Selection I am looking for. Heres what I do have, I threw out the rest because it simply is no help, this is whats left of the turotial one I was modifying.
import java.io.File;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import org.xml.sax.SAXParseException;
public class RWXML{
public static void main (String argv []){
try {
     DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
     DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
     Document doc = docBuilder.parse (new File("RedWineData.xml"));
     // normalize text representation
     doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
     NodeList listOfmenus = doc.getElementsByTagName("menu");
     int totalmenus = listOfmenus.getLength();
     System.out.println("Total Number of Menus: " + totalmenus);
     for(int s=0; s<listOfmenus.getLength() ; s++){
// What do I put here so that I can actully check the
// name = vs whatever selection im checking for, and then how
// do i pull up the subsiquent name of each Item contiained
// under the Selection.
     }//end of for loop with s var
     }catch (SAXParseException err) {
          System.out.println ("** Parsing error" + ", line " + err.getLineNumber () + ", uri " + err.getSystemId ());
          System.out.println(" " + err.getMessage ());
     }catch (SAXException e) {
          Exception x = e.getException ();
          ((x == null) ? e : x).printStackTrace ();
     }catch (Throwable t) {
          t.printStackTrace ();
     //System.exit (0);
}//end of main
I'm completely out of ideas, if anyone could help me, that would be awsome.

Answer 1

first of, when you are parsing large amounts of data, use sax parsing. Dom will try to load the complete doc in memory, and that could become a bit large.
Having said that, lets look at some sample code
public class ReadMenus extends DefaultHandler {
   private Menu menu;
   private MenuItem menuItem
   private List program;
   public List parse (String xmlFile) throws IOException, SAXException {
      XMLReader xr = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader( "org.apache.xerces.parsers.SAXParser" );
      xr.setContentHandler( this );
      FileReader r = new FileReader( xmlFile );
      xr.parse( new InputSource( r ) );
      return program;
   public void startDocument () {
      program = new ArrayList();
   public void endDocument () {
   public void startElement ( String uri, String name, String qName, Attributes atts ) throws SAXException {
      String nameValue = atts.getValue( "name" );
      System.out.println( "New element " + qName + "(" + nameValue + ")" );
      if ( qName.equals( "menu" ) ) {
         menu = new Menu();
         menu.setName( atts.getValue( "name" ) );
         if ( atts.getValue("abc") != null ) {
            menu.setAbc( atts.getValue("abc") );
         if ( atts.getValue( "default" ) != null && atts.getValue( "default" ).equals( "yes" ) ) {
            menu.setRequired(true);
         else {
            menu.setRequired(false);
      else if ( qName.equals( "item" ) ) {
         menuItem = new MenuItem();
         menuItem.setName( atts.getValue( "name" ) );
   public void endElement ( String uri, String name, String qName ) {
      if ( qName.equals( "menu" ) ) {
         program.add( menu );
         menu = null;
      else if ( qName.equals( "item" ) ) {
         menu.add( menuItem );
         menuItem = null;
   public void characters ( char ch[], int start, int length ) {
Now you can use
ReadMenus rm = new ReadMenus();
Program program = rm.parse("yourXmlFile.xml");
for (int i=0; i<program.size(); i++ ) {
   Menu menu = (Menu) program.get(i);
   for (int j=0; j<menu.size(); j++) {
      MenuItem menuItem = (MenuItem) menu.get(j);
      // do your things
}Just keep in mind, that you still have to define your Menu and MenuItem class.
hope this helps