reading an xml value in groovy

Question

i have checked around the site and although many people are looking for similar solutions, a solution to my specific problem has not been posted, nor has a similar question been asked.

i have an XML that looks like this:

<root>
 <item1>TEXT A</item1>
 <item2>TEXT B</item2>
 <subs>
  <sub1>
   <thing property1='valueA' property2='valueB'>
    <foo>fooA</foo>
  </sub1>
  <sub2>
   <thing property1='valueC' property2='valueD'>
    <foo>fooA</foo>
  </sub2>
 </subs>
</root>

i want to get "TEXT B"

i am thinking

def xml = new XmlParser().parseText(MY_XML_FILE)

but now how do i access "TEXT B" ??

xml.root.item2.text

does not work. any thoughts?

Answer 1

There's a few things going on here:

1. Groovy's XmlParser and XmlSlurper (I recommend the latter) take an XML document wrapped in a root element (well-formed XML always exists in a root element). Groovy doesn't require you to specify the root element, so

   xml.root.item1

can become

xml.item1

If you have many item1s, you need to access them as an array.

xml.item1[0]

1. Your XML is not well-formed. You're missing two end tags.

2. To get the inner text of a node, use text() instead of text (it's a method).

Here are some excellent resources on both XmlParser and XmlSlurper .