Parsing a Document with DOM (XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition)

18.6. Parsing a Document with DOM

Though the DOM standard doesn't specify an actual interface for parsing a document, most implementations provide a simple parsing interface that accepts a reference to an XML document file, stream, or URI. After this interface successfully parses and validates the document (if it is a validating parser), it generally provides a mechanism for getting a reference to the Document interface's instance for the parsed document. The following code fragment shows how to parse a document using the Apache Xerces XML DOM parser:

// create a new parser
DOMParser dp = new DOMParser( );

// parse the document and get the DOM Document interface
dp.parse("http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006.xml");
Document doc = dp.getDocument( );

TIP: DOM Level 3 will be adding standard mechanisms for loading XML documents and reserializing (saving) DOM trees as XML. JAXP also provides standardized approaches for these processes in Java, though JAXP and DOM Level 3 may offer different approaches.