How to retrieve element value of XML using Java?

If you are just looking to get a single value from the XML you may want to use Java's XPath library. For an example see my answer to a previous question:

• How to use XPath on xml docs having default namespace

It would look something like:

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        try {
            DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document dDoc = builder.parse("E:/test.xml");

            XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
            Node node = (Node) xPath.evaluate("/Request/@name", dDoc, XPathConstants.NODE);
            System.out.println(node.getNodeValue());
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }

}

There are a number of different ways to do this. You might want to check out XStream or JAXB. There are tutorials and the examples.

In case you just need one (first) value to retrieve from xml:

public static String getTagValue(String xml, String tagName){
    return xml.split("<"+tagName+">")[1].split("</"+tagName+">")[0];
}

In case you want to parse whole xml document use JSoup:

Document doc = Jsoup.parse(xml, "", Parser.xmlParser());
for (Element e : doc.select("Request")) {
    System.out.println(e);
}

If your XML is a String, Then you can do the following:

String xml = ""; //Populated XML String....

DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document document = builder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
Element rootElement = document.getDocumentElement();

If your XML is in a file, then Document document will be instantiated like this:

Document document = builder.parse(new File("file.xml"));

The document.getDocumentElement() returns you the node that is the document element of the document (in your case <config>).

Once you have a rootElement, you can access the element's attribute (by calling rootElement.getAttribute() method), etc. For more methods on java's org.w3c.dom.Element

More info on java DocumentBuilder & DocumentBuilderFactory. Bear in mind, the example provided creates a XML DOM tree so if you have a huge XML data, the tree can be huge.

• Related question.

---

Update Here's an example to get "value" of element <requestqueue>

protected String getString(String tagName, Element element) {
        NodeList list = element.getElementsByTagName(tagName);
        if (list != null && list.getLength() > 0) {
            NodeList subList = list.item(0).getChildNodes();

            if (subList != null && subList.getLength() > 0) {
                return subList.item(0).getNodeValue();
            }
        }

        return null;
    }

You can effectively call it as,

String requestQueueName = getString("requestqueue", element);