I was reading one of the interview question about parsing an XML.
I wrote a very high level and incomplete skeleton of the algorithm , and was looking for some help in writing a simple algo [I assume one exists, because this was asked as an interview question so should be doable in 45 mins I guess].
Here is my attempt:
// Assume well-formedness
public static Node parseXML(String xml)
{
Node root = new XMLParse().new Node();
while(!helper.endOfElements())
{
// Returns name of root element
root.name = helper.getName(xml);
// Returns value of root element
root.name = helper.getValue(xml);
// returns each child in a String and returns all such children as
// a String Array
// Basically splits based on <> </> elements and return that as a String
String[] children = helper.getChildren(xml);
if(children.length!=0)
{
root.childList = new ArrayList<XMLParse.Node>();
for(int i=0; i<children.length;i++)
{
root.childList.add(parseXML(children[i]));
}
}
}
return root;
}
class Node
{
String name;
String value;
List<Node> childList;
public String getName()
{
return name;
}
public String getValue()
{
return value;
}
public List<Node> getChildList()
{
return childList;
}
}
Class helper()
{
// Returns the name of the root of the xml
public static String getName(String XML);
// Returns the value of the root of the xml
public static String getValue(String XML)
// Splits the XML into top level childern of the root of the passed XML
public static String[] getChildren(String XML)
}
I am hoping someone can give me a pseudo-code/code for doing this or may be provide an easy way of implementing the helper function in my algo.
I know there are built in classes to do this like in here , but using them would beat the purpose I guess. Also, many things used in this link are just interfaces so I couldnt find any implementation of say docBuilder.parse (new File("book.xml")) method.
