Download version 2.06 of the JAR file for JDOM from http://www.jdom.org/downloads/index.html.

In Eclipse, create a project and include the JAR file an external JAR.

Open up notepad. Create a new file named xmldummy with the .xml extension. The content of the file will be as simple as follows:

Create a SAXBuilder object named builder:

       SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder(); 

Now you need to create a File object to point to the XML file that you will be parsing. If you have saved your XML file in the C:/ drive, then type in the following code segment:

        File file = new File("c:/dummyxml.xml"); 

In a try block, you are going to create a Document object, which will be your XML file:

        try { 
          Document document = (Document) builder.build(file); 

When you are parsing an XML, as it is tree structured, you need to know the root element of the file to start traversing the tree (in other words, to start parsing systematically). So, you are creating a rootNode object of type Element to hold the root element, which in our example is <book> node:

        Element rootNode = document.getRootElement(); 

Then, you will be retrieving all the children nodes of your root node that have the name author. The names come as a list, and therefore, you will be using a list variable to hold them:

        List list = rootNode.getChildren("author"); 

Next, you will be iterating over this list using a for loop to get the elements of the entries in this list. Each element will be kept in an Element type variable named node. This variable has a method named getChildText(), which takes the name of its child as parameter; the method returns the textual content of the named child element, or null if there is no such child. This method is convenient because calling getChild().getText() can throw a NullPointerException:

        for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) { 
           Element node = (Element) list.get(i); 
        System.out.println("First Name : " + 
          node.getChildText("firstname")); 
        System.out.println("Last Name : " +             
          node.getChildText("lastname")); 
        } 

Finally, you will be closing the try block; put the following catch blocks to handle exceptions:

        } catch (IOException io) { 
              System.out.println(io.getMessage()); 
        } catch (JDOMException jdomex) { 
              System.out.println(jdomex.getMessage()); 
        }  

The complete code for the recipe is as follows:

import java.io.File; 
import java.io.IOException; 
import java.util.List; 
 
import org.jdom2.Document; 
import org.jdom2.Element; 
import org.jdom2.JDOMException; 
import org.jdom2.input.SAXBuilder; 
 
public class TestJdom { 
 
   public static void main(String[] args){ 
      TestJdom test = new TestJdom(); 
      test.parseXml("C:/dummyxml.com"); 
 
   } 
   public void parseXml(String fileName){ 
      SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder(); 
      File file = new File(fileName); 
      try { 
         Document document = (Document) builder.build(file); 
         Element rootNode = document.getRootElement(); 
         List list = rootNode.getChildren("author"); 
         for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) { 
            Element node = (Element) list.get(i); 
            System.out.println("First Name : " + 
                node.getChildText("firstname")); 
            System.out.println("Last Name : " + 
                node.getChildText("lastname")); 
         } 
      } catch (IOException io) { 
         System.out.println(io.getMessage()); 
      } catch (JDOMException jdomex) { 
         System.out.println(jdomex.getMessage()); 
      } 
   } 
}