How to read multiple XML files in Java?

Question

I have a directory which contains several XML files in the similar format. Below is one example

<students>
    <forename>Joe</forename>
    <surname>Bloggs</surname>
    <DOB>01/01/1970</DOB>
    <educationLevel>High School</educationLevel>
</students>

Is there a way to iterate through the directory containing the xml files(maybe in some sort of loop?) and read the xml files one by one?

Answer 1

Get the XML files residing directory

• Get the no of .xml files present in the specific directory (validate the extension of each file for this operation so that other file formats are eliminated)
• Then put it in the loop and iterate over each file and parse them according to your parser (DOM, SAX, JAXB etc.,) and save it in required format

Answer 2

You could use the following approach to iterate through .xml files in the given directory:

public static void readFiles(String directory) throws IOException {
    File dir = new File(directory);
    if (dir.exists() && dir.isDirectory()) {
        File [] files = dir.listFiles((d, name) -> name.endsWith(".xml"));
        if (files != null) {
            for (File file: files) {
                String xml = new String(Files.readAllBytes(file.toPath()), 
                                        Charset.defaultCharset());
                //parse xml
            }
        }
    }
}

And to parse XML you could use, for example, Jackson Object Mapper :

ObjectMapper xmlMapper = new XmlMapper();
YourPOJO value = xmlMapper.readValue(xml, YourPOJO.class);

Answer 3

Retrieve all the student tags in an array for example in python I wanted to get all divs with a specific id:

link4 = "Any HTML Link"

data3 = requests.get(link4)

soup5 = BeautifulSoup(data3.text, "lxml")

soup6 = BeautifulSoup(str(soup5.findAll("div", { "id" : "specs-list" })),"lxml")

After this, you can iterate over soup6 turn by turn

Answer 4

I ended up doing this:

public static void directoryLoop(File folder) {
    for (final File fileEntry : folder.listFiles()) {
        if (fileEntry.isDirectory()) {
            directoryLoop(fileEntry);
        } else {
            xmlReader(fileEntry.getName());
        }
    }
}

where xmlReader(fileEntry.getName()); is my method for reading the XML files which takes the file name as a parmeter.

Answer 5

assuming that you have the reading of the xmlfile already implemented and that you know your filenames you could do something like this:

List<String> filenames;

for(String filename : filenames){
    myXmlReadingMethod( "path of my Files " + filename);
}

I hope this helps you abit.