Count XML Elements in Java using DOM parser example

Nikos MaravitsasMarch 12th, 2013Last Updated: March 12th, 2013

0 364 1 minute read

In this example we are going to see how to count elements with specific tag names using a DOM parser in Java.

Basically all you have to do in order to count elements in an XML elements is:

Open and parse an XML Document using a DocumentBuilder
Use Document.getElementsByTagName that will return a list with nodes.
Simply print out the length of the above list using getLength method.

Here is the XML file we are going to use as an input:

testFile.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><company>
 
    <employee id="10">
 
        <lastname>Harley</lastname>
        <email>james@example.org</email>
        <department>Human Resources</department>
        <salary>2000000</salary>
        <address>34 Stanley St.</address>
 
    </employee>
 
    <employee id="2">
        <firstname>John</firstname>
        <lastname>May</lastname>
        <email>john@example.org</email>
        <department>Logistics</department>
        <salary>400</salary>
    </employee>
 
</company>

Let’s take a look at the code:

CountXMLElementJava.java:

package com.javacodegeeks.java.core;
 
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
 
public class CountXMLElementJava {
 
    private static final String xmlfilepath = "C:\\Users\\nikos7\\Desktop\\filesForExamples\\testFile.xml";
 
    public static void main(String argv[]) {
 
        try {
            DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
 
            DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = documentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
 
            Document document = documentBuilder.parse(xmlfilepath);
 
            NodeList nodeList = document.getElementsByTagName("employee");
 
            System.out.println("Number of elements with tag name employee : " + nodeList.getLength());
 
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException pce) {
            pce.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException ioe) {
            ioe.printStackTrace();
        } catch (SAXException sae) {
            sae.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Output:

Number of elements with tag name employee : 2

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Count XML Elements in Java using DOM parser example

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Nikos Maravitsas

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Nikos Maravitsas

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