xml-dev - xml parsing how-to?

["rsanford" <rsanford@nolimitsystems.com>]

newbie question. i wanted to search the archives but the
links on xml.org are not functioning.

i'm using ibm's xml4c java parser and i'm using the
DOM api and i have come to the conclusion that the
code i'm writing, while effective, is, very simply,
baboon-butt ugly.

i have a dtd and i am receiving a document that follows
that dtd. to retrieve all the data from the document i
am explicitly navigating through elements in the dtd
and their children and retrieving the values from them
by using DOM_Element::getElementsByTagName("ElementName")
and then iterating through each element in the list and,
if appropriate, asking each one for its text node and
then getting the element value from that text node.

i have line after line of code that looks at an element
with a hard-coded name and then gets the value and it
is ugly. there _has_ to be a better way. somebody please
tell me there is a better way.

the sample code that i have seen is not particularly
useful. there are lots of samples where a tree is printed
out as it is parsedbut i haven't found any code that
gives an example of knowing what the dtd is and actually
_using_ the data within the xml document to do something
(like store in columns in a database).

does anyone have any pointers to good texts on parsing
xml? useful sample code appreciated.

thanks,

rjsjr

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