<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE database [
    <!ELEMENT database (item)*>
        <!ELEMENT item (name,sequence)>
            <!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
            <!ELEMENT sequence (#PCDATA)>
]>
<database>
    <item>
        <name>YBL014c</name>
        <sequence>ATGAGTG</sequence>
    </item>
    <item>
        <name>YBL025w</name>
        <sequence>ATGCTGA</sequence>
    </item>
</database>

Here's the example I'm working with. When I call
getElementsByName("item"), it returns 2 items as expected. Then when I
call getChildNodes, it returns a NodeList of length 5 for some reason,
even though there are only two child nodes per item? Two of them are
the "name" and "sequence" nodes, and 3 of them are "#text". Plus,
getting to the node values in the "name" and "sequence" nodes is not
completely intuitive. I can get to them, but the method calls seem
weird. (i.e. code below for tempName and tempSeq). If there were more
than two nodes in each "item", how would I get to it, since in this
example I'm coming at the values from opposite sides?

Oh, I'm using the DocumentBuilderFactory -> DocumentBuilder -> Document
- XML Parser from the javax.xml.parsers package.

In my code: nl is a NodeList from getElementsByTagName("item");

...
           Node temp = nl.item(i);

           NodeList tl = temp.getChildNodes();
           Node tn = nl.item(i);

           tempName =
tn.getFirstChild().getNextSibling().getFirstChild().getNodeValue();

           tempSeq =
tn.getLastChild().getPreviousSibling().getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
...

Dennis