Let's go straight to the code comparison.
There are many steps involved in java before actually getting the xml doc elements that match with xpath expression defined.
DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
factory.setNamespaceAware(true); // never forget this!
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = builder.parse("books.xml");
XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
XPath xpath = factory.newXPath();
XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("//book[author='Neal Stephenson']/title/text()");
Object result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
NodeList nodes = (NodeList) result;
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
System.out.println(nodes.item(i).getNodeValue());
}
I took the example from IBM website, here. You should check out the link if you are interested using xpath in java.
Now, in Python, using lxml library.
doc = etree.parse("books.xml")
nodes = doc.xpath("//book[author='Neal Stephenson']/title/text()")
print(nodes)
I mostly use java for my projects, pretty much happy with it, even though sometimes I wish that java has some syntactic sugars like in C#.
So, if you have the option to choose which programming language for your xml projects, give Python a try. I am sure you will like it.
