In my previous post I showed different ways in which we can parse XML document in Java. You must have noticed the code being too much verbose. Other JVM languages like Groovy, Scala provide much better support for parsing XML documents.
In this post I give you the code to parse the XML document in Grooy and one can compare the ease with which we can parse XML documents. I make use of XmlSlurper API in Groovy which loads the complete XML into a tree and this tree can be then navigated using Groovy’s version of XPath called GPath.
The XML document I am using is the same one used here and also the intent is to parse the XML and create a list of Employee object.
class XmlParserDemo {
static void main(args){
def empList = new ArrayList<Employee>();
def emp;
def employees =
new XmlSlurper().parse(ClassLoader.
getSystemResourceAsStream("xml/employee.xml"));
employees.employee.each{ node ->
emp = new Employee();
emp.firstName = node.firstName
emp.lastName = node.lastName
emp.id = node.@id
emp.location = node.location
empList.add(emp)
}
empList.each{ empT -> println(empT)}
}
}
class Employee{
String firstName
String lastName
String id
String location
@Override
public String toString(){
return "${firstName} ${lastName}(${id}) in ${location}"
}
}
The output is:
Rakesh Mishra(111) in Bangalore John Davis(112) in Chennai Rajesh Sharma(113) in Pune
And the XML is present in the “xml” package and is available in the classpath of the application. I am using the ClassLoader to load the XML resource.
simpler and easier to write. And when you are dealing with RESTful APIs- you ought to be parsing XML,JSON and what not. As a Java programmer- I never enjoyed it. But Groovy really made parsing xml fun again. 