[java] Getting XML Node text value with Java DOM

I can't fetch text value with Node.getNodeValue(), Node.getFirstChild().getNodeValue() or with Node.getTextContent().

My XML is like

<add job="351">
    <tag>foobar</tag>
    <tag>foobar2</tag>
</add>

And I'm trying to get tag value (non-text element fetching works fine). My Java code sounds like

Document doc = db.parse(new File(args[0]));
Node n = doc.getFirstChild();
NodeList nl = n.getChildNodes();   
Node an,an2;

for (int i=0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {
    an = nl.item(i);

    if(an.getNodeType()==Node.ELEMENT_NODE) {
        NodeList nl2 = an.getChildNodes();

        for(int i2=0; i2<nl2.getLength(); i2++) {
            an2 = nl2.item(i2);

            // DEBUG PRINTS
            System.out.println(an2.getNodeName() + ": type (" + an2.getNodeType() + "):");

            if(an2.hasChildNodes())
                System.out.println(an2.getFirstChild().getTextContent());

            if(an2.hasChildNodes())
                System.out.println(an2.getFirstChild().getNodeValue());

            System.out.println(an2.getTextContent());
            System.out.println(an2.getNodeValue());
        }
    }
}

It prints out

tag type (1): 
tag1
tag1
tag1
null
#text type (3):
_blank line_
_blank line_
...

Thanks for the help.

If you are open to vtd-xml, which excels at both performance and memory efficiency, below is the code to do what you are looking for...in both XPath and manual navigation... the overall code is much concise and easier to understand ...

import com.ximpleware.*;
public class queryText {
    public static void main(String[] s) throws VTDException{
        VTDGen vg = new VTDGen();
        if (!vg.parseFile("input.xml", true))
            return;
        VTDNav vn = vg.getNav();
        AutoPilot ap = new AutoPilot(vn);
        // first manually navigate
        if(vn.toElement(VTDNav.FC,"tag")){
            int i= vn.getText();
            if (i!=-1){
                System.out.println("text ===>"+vn.toString(i));
            }
            if (vn.toElement(VTDNav.NS,"tag")){
                i=vn.getText();
                System.out.println("text ===>"+vn.toString(i));
            }
        }

        // second version use XPath
        ap.selectXPath("/add/tag/text()");
        int i=0;
        while((i=ap.evalXPath())!= -1){
            System.out.println("text node ====>"+vn.toString(i));
        }
    }
}

If your XML goes quite deep, you might want to consider using XPath, which comes with your JRE, so you can access the contents far more easily using:

String text = xp.evaluate("//add[@job='351']/tag[position()=1]/text()", 
    document.getDocumentElement());

Full example:

import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;
import java.io.StringReader;    
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;    
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.xml.sax.InputSource;

public class XPathTest {

    private Document document;

    @Before
    public void setup() throws Exception {
        String xml = "<add job=\"351\"><tag>foobar</tag><tag>foobar2</tag></add>";
        DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
        document = db.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(xml)));
    }

    @Test
    public void testXPath() throws Exception {
        XPathFactory xpf = XPathFactory.newInstance();
        XPath xp = xpf.newXPath();
        String text = xp.evaluate("//add[@job='351']/tag[position()=1]/text()",
                document.getDocumentElement());
        assertEquals("foobar", text);
    }
}

I use a very old java. Jdk 1.4.08 and I had the same issue. The Node class for me did not had the getTextContent() method. I had to use Node.getFirstChild().getNodeValue() instead of Node.getNodeValue() to get the value of the node. This fixed for me.