This Example extracts and print the "b" node in the following XML.
Input XML

<top> <a/> <b> <b1/> <b2/> </b> <c/> </top>

In XML, the document contains a single top element. We'll just extract that and store it.

Each DOM node has a name and a value retrieved using getNodeName() and getNodeValue(). For an Element, the name is the tag name and the value is null.

Traversing nodes uses a combination of:

getFirstChild()
getLastChild()
getNextSibling()
getPreviousSibling()
getParentNode()

Since those return a Node, you'll often need to cast the results to the correct type. Remember, that the child nodes also includes Text nodes, including whitespace-only text nodes. You can't assume that any child is an Element, So you'll always need to test the node name or the node type.

The following pattern is a common method for finding a node as the child.
Finding Elements with the DOM

import java.io.*; import javax.xml.parsers.*; import org.w3c.dom.*; import com.caucho.xml.*; ... // Create a new parser using the JAXP API (javax.xml.parsers) DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); // Create a new document Document doc = builder.parse("test.xml"); // Get the top element Element top = doc.getDocumentElement(); // Find the B element Node ptr; for (ptr = top.getFirstChild(); ptr != null && ! ptr.getNodeName().equals("b"); ptr = ptr.getNextSibling()) { }