XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Parsing a Document with DOM

Although DOM Level 2 doesn’t specify an actual interface for parsing a document, most implementations provide a simple parsing interface that accepts a reference to an XML document file, stream, or URI. After this interface successfully parses and validates the document (if it is a validating parser), it generally provides a mechanism for getting a reference to the Document interface’s instance for the parsed document. The following code fragment shows how to parse a document using the Apache Xerces XML DOM parser:

// create a new parser
DOMParser dp = new DOMParser( );
     
// parse the document and get the DOM Document interface
dp.parse("http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.xml");
Document doc = dp.getDocument( );

Tip

DOM Level 3 adds standard mechanisms for loading XML documents and reserializing (saving) DOM trees as XML. JAXP also provides standardized approaches for these processes in Java, although JAXP and DOM Level 3 offer different approaches.