Java - convert xml object to String

Question

So I am pulling out specific tags and elements from an xml document using xPath and storing it in an object. My question is how can I convert this object to a string. I have tried the .toString() method, but all that it give me is the following: LocalHost test: org.apache.xml.dtm.ref.DTMNodeList@717e717e my code is below: ``` DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); domFactory.setNamespaceAware(true); // never forget this! DocumentBuilder builder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder(); org.w3c.dom.Document doc = builder.parse("src/webSphere/testcases/positiveCode-data.xml"); XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance(); XPath xpath = factory.newXPath(); XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile(" /tests/class/method/params[@name='config']/param/text()"); MQQueueConnectionFactory cf = new MQQueueConnectionFactory(); Object result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET); System.out.println("LocalHost test: " + result.toString()); ``` here is my xml file:…

Accepted Answer

Sure. You can see that you have an instance of a `NodeList`.

You can get the length of the list and then all `Node` items at a specific indexes and print them out based on what you expect of them - most likely their text content, so `Node#getTextContent()` (or anything other you want to print out - node name, node type etc.) in a loop.

```
NodeList resultList = (NodeList)expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
int listLength = resultList.getLength();
for (int i = 0; i < listLength; i++) {
    System.out.println("LocalHost test (" + i + "): " + resultList.item(i).getTextContent());
}
```

EDIT

If you expect a single String value simply do

```
String resultList = (String)expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.STRING);
```

This will convert the result to a String following the XPath String conversion rules.

Java - convert xml object to String

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