Java XPath – Check if Node or Attribute Exists?

Java example to check if a node exists in given XML content or check if an attribute exists in XML using XPath.

1. How to check if an XML node or attribute exists?

To verify if a node or tag exists in an XML document, we can use one of two approaches:

1. Select the nodes using XPath expression and count the matches.

• ‘matching_nodes > zero‘ means XML tag/attribute exists.
• ‘matching_nodes <= zero‘ means XML tag/attribute does not exist.

#Expression for finding all employee ids where id is an attribute
//employees/employee/@id 

2. Use count() function is the expression to directly access the count of matching nodes. If count is greater than zero, then the node exists, else not.

#Directly count all the ids
count(//employees/employee/@id)

2. Demo

2.1. XML File

For demo purposes, we are using the following XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<employees>

  <employee id="1">
    <firstName>Lokesh</firstName>
    <lastName>Gupta</lastName>
    <department>
      <id>101</id>
      <name>IT</name>
    </department>
  </employee>

  <employee id="2">
    <firstName>Brian</firstName>
    <lastName>Schultz</lastName>
    <department>
      <id>102</id>
      <name>HR</name>
    </department>
  </employee>

</employees>

2.2. XPath Evaluation

The following code uses both of the above-discussed techniques to find if a node or attribute exists. To understand the code in-depth, read the XPath tutorial.

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPath;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathConstants;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathExpression;
import javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

public class CheckIfNodeExists {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    factory.setNamespaceAware(true);
    DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = builder.parse("employees.xml");

    XPathFactory xpathfactory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
    XPath xpath = xpathfactory.newXPath();

    //1
    XPathExpression expr = xpath.compile("//employees/employee/@id");
    Object result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);
    NodeList nodes = (NodeList) result;
    if(nodes.getLength() > 0) {
      System.out.println("Attribute or Node Exists");
    } else {
      System.out.println("Attribute or Node Does Not Exist");
    }

    //2
    expr = xpath.compile("count(//employees/employee/@id)");
    result = expr.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NUMBER);
    Double count = (Double) result;
    if(count > 0) {
      System.out.println("Attribute or Node Exists");
    } else {
      System.out.println("Attribute or Node Does Not Exist");
    }

  }
}

Program Output:

Attribute or Node Exists
Attribute or Node Exists

Happy Learning !!

Sourcecode in Github