Loading XML into memory

Question

I want to read an XML file into memory as a tree of nodes, on which I could perform further operations. Something like C#'s XDocument. What is the Java equivalent of C#'s XDocument.Load?

Answer 1

You're looking for the Java XML DOM classes, which are part of JAXP. It's much uglier than in C#.

• A DocumentBuilderFactory creates...
• A DocumentBuilder which creates...
• A Document which is what you're really after.

An excellent reference for all this: the JAXP Tutorial, Chapter 3: The Document Object Model.