Arne,

See below my respone to Michael.

Yes, I can be able to parse the xml data, but to retrieve this kind of
empty tag <weight/> is my problem.

<weight> something </weight> can be retrieved though!

Thanks!

...

With what exact exception or error message?
Please copy/paste it (or at least, the first few lines).

...

For my info., an SSCCE* serves better..

But note that the API documentation mentions that
the second method called might not return an Object,
therefore the call of the third method on the null
returned by the second method might iteslf
result in a NullPointerException.

( BTW -Multiple statements on one line, is not
the best strategy for debugging broken code. )

There are a variety of other things that might be
happening, best examined in that SSCCE.

* <http://www.physci.org/codes/sscce>

Andrew T.

BeGreen schrieb:

Note, org.w3c.dom.Node is an interface.

It's correct that you can't get the first child of an empty element: an
empty element is empty.

Change your code to something like:

if ( node.getNodeName()=="weight" ) {
    String weightValue = (node.hasChildNodes()
            ? node.getFirstChild().getNodeValue()
            : "EMPTY");
}

Bye
Michael

An empty tag has no child nodes. Find out how many children a node has
by using node.getChildNodes().getLength();
See Michael's example below in which I've extended to obtain the value
of the <weight> tags.

import java.io.*;
import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;

public class XMLTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>\n"
                + "<root>\n"
                + "  <Record>\n"
                + "    <PartNo>01</PartNo>\n"
                + "    <weight/>\n"
                + "  </Record>\n"
                + "  <Record>\n"
                + "    <PartNo>2</PartNo>\n"
                + "    <weight>A</weight>\n"
                + "  </Record>\n" + "</root>";
        System.out.println(xml);
        byte data[] = xml.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
        ByteArrayInputStream is = new ByteArrayInputStream(data);

        DocumentBuilderFactory factory =
            DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        Document doc = builder.parse(is);
        is.close();
        inspect(doc);
        System.out.println("Done.");
    }

    private static void inspect(Node node) {
        if (node != null) {
            if ("weight".equals(node.getNodeName())) {
                String weightValue;
                NodeList children = node.getChildNodes();
                if (children.getLength() > 0) {
                    weightValue = node.getFirstChild().getNodeValue();
                }
                else
                {
                    weightValue = "#empty#";
                }
                System.out.println(node + " " + weightValue);
            }

            NodeList children = node.getChildNodes();
            int n = children.getLength();
            for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
                inspect(children.item(i));
            }
        }
    }
}