Reading XML using Groovy's DOMCategory

Information

Java has in-built support for DOM processing of XML using classes representing the various parts of XML documents, e.g. Document, Element, NodeList, Attr etc. For more information about these classes, refer to the respective JavaDocs. Some of the key classes are:

DOM class	JavaDocs
Element	1.4 5
NodeList	1.4 5

Groovy syntax benefits can be applied when using these classes. In addition, the DOMCategory class provides the following additional helper methods:

DOM class	Method	Description/Equivalent longhand
Element	.'child'	.getElementsByTagName('child')
Element	.child	.getElementsByTagName('child')
Element	.''*	.getElementsByTagName('')*
Element	.'@attr'	.getAttribute('attr')
Element	.text()	.firstChild.nodeValue (or textContent if you are using Xerces)
Element	.name()	.nodeName
Element	.parent()	.parentNode
Element	.children()	.childNodes
NodeList	.size()	.length
NodeList	[n]	.item(n)
NodeList	.text()	.collect{ it.text() }
NodeList	.child	flattened version of .getElementsByTagName('child') for each node in the NodeList
NodeList	.iterator()	same as for loop, enables closures, e.g. findAll, every, etc.

All these methods return either Element or NodeList classes or String values for attributes. There are no new classes to know about, just some improved syntax.

Example

This example assumes the following class is already on your CLASSPATH:

XmlExamples.groovy

Here is an example of using Groovy's DOMCategory: