Get an Attribute from an Element. Returns an empty String if none found : DOM Attribute « XML « Java Tutorial

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import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

public class Utils {
  /**
   * Get an Attribute from an Element.  Returns an empty String if none found
   * @param element the containing Element
   * @param name the attribute name
   * @return Attribute as a String
   */
  public static String getAttribute(Element element, String name) {
    return element.getAttribute(name);
  }
  /**
   * Return a list of named Elements with a specific attribute value.
   * @param element the containing Element
   * @param name the tag name
   * @param attribute Attribute name
   * @param value Attribute value
   * @param returnFirst Return only the first matching value?
   * @return List of matching elements
   */
  public static List selectElementsByAttributeValue(Element element, String name,
                                                    String attribute, String value,
                                                    boolean returnFirst) {
    NodeList  elementList = element.getElementsByTagName(name);
    List      resultList  = new ArrayList();

    for (int i = 0; i < elementList.getLength(); i++) {
      if (getAttribute((Element) elementList.item(i), attribute).equals(value)) {
        resultList.add(elementList.item(i));
        if (returnFirst) {
          break;
        }
      }
    }
    return resultList;
  }
}