Real World XML

Filtering XML Documents

The previous example displayed the entire document, but you can be more selective than that through a process called filtering. When you filter a document, you extract only those elements you're interested in.

Here's an example named ch11_04.java. In this case, I'll let the user specify what document to search and what element name to search for like this, which will display all <ITEM> elements in ch11_01.xml:

%java ch11_04 ch11_01.xml ITEM 

I'll start this program by creating a new class, FindElements, to make the programming a little easier. All I have to do is pass the document to search and the element name to search for to the contructor of this new class:

 import javax.xml.parsers.*; import org.w3c.dom.*; public ...