By now we have created Documents, edited them and navigated the Document. Now we have to actually grab some data from the Elements. For this I’ll demonstrate two methods. One is to retrieve a text from an Element and the other is to retrieve CDATA from an Element.

In order to retrieve a text from a node we need to scan all its children and look for Text or CDATA nodes


/**
* Gets the String value of the node.
If the node does not contain text then an empty String is returned
* @param node the node of interest
* @return the value of that node
*/
public static String getTextForNode(Node node)
{
   NodeList children;
   Node childNode;
   String returnString = “”;
   children = node.getChildNodes();
   if (children != null)
   {
      for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++)
      {
         childNode = children.item(i);
         if ((childNode.getNodeType() == Node.TEXT_NODE) || (childNode.getNodeType() == Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE))
         {
            returnString = childNode.getNodeValue();
            break;
         }
      }
   }
   return returnString;
}

We’ll use similar technic to grab all the data from a CDATA Node


/**
* Returns the text from all CDATA sections of the specified element.
* @param element the element
* @return the value of the CDATA sections or null
*/
public static String getCDATA(Element element)
{
   StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
   NodeList children = element.getChildNodes();
   for (int i = 0; i < children.getLength(); i++)
   {
     Node child = children.item(i);
     if (child.getNodeType() == Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE)
     {
       CDATASection section = (CDATASection)child;
       buffer.append(section.getNodeValue());
     }
   }
   String returnValue = null;
   if (buffer.length() > 0)
   {
     returnValue = buffer.toString();
   }
   return returnValue;
}


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