JAXP DOM Reference

External

• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/

Internal

• JAXP DOM

Overview

All JAXP DOM interfaces are part of the org.w3c.dom package.

For an example of how to walk a DOM tree, see:

https://github.com/NovaOrdis/playground/tree/master/java/xml/dom-reading

Node

The process of navigating to a node involves processing sub-elements, ignoring the uninteresting ones and inspecting the interesting ones, recursively. A robust DOM application must do these things:

• When searching for an element
  • ignore comments, attributes and processing instructions
  • allow for the possibility that sub-elements do not occur in the expected order
  • skip over TEXT nodes that contain ignorable white space. Warning new lines in the file are returned as text, so they have to be handled.
• When extracting text for a node:
  • extract text from CDATA as well as text nodes
  • ignore comments, attributes and processing instructions when gathering text
  • if an entity reference node or another element node is encountered, recurse.

Node Types

A node type can be obtained with getNodeType() call, and it is one of the following:

ELEMENT_NODE

Node type: 1

ATTRIBUTE_NODE

Node type: 2

Node Name, Value and Attributes

Interface	nodeName	nodeValue	attributes
Element	Element.tagName	null	NamedNodeMap
Text	"#text"	same as CharacterData.data, the content of the text node	null
Attr	same as Attr.name	same as Attr.value	null
CDATASection	"#cdata-section"	same as CharacterData.data, the content of the CDATA Section	null
Comment	"#comment"	same as CharacterData.data, the content of the comment	null
Document	"#document"	null	null
DocumentFragment	"#document-fragment"	null	null
DocumentType	same as DocumentType.name	null	null
Entity	entity name	null	null
Notation	notation name	null	null
ProcessingInstruction	same as ProcessingInstruction.target	same as ProcessingInstruction.data	null

Node's Text Content

To get the text a node contains, you need to look through the list of child nodes, ignoring entries that are of no concern and accumulating the text you find in TEXT nodes, CDATA nodes, and EntityRef nodes.

Element

An Element extends a Node.