Reading XML content with namespaces

XML namespaces, in a way, are similar to Java packages because they allow creating an additional context for grouping a set of elements. We already noted some differences in namespace handling for the XmlParser and XmlSlurper classes in the Reading XML using XmlParser and Reading XML using XmlSlurper recipes.

In this recipe, we dig a bit deeper into the details of XML namespace support in Groovy.

Getting ready

Let's use the same shakespeare.xml file we used for the Reading XML using XmlParser and Reading XML using XmlSlurper recipes.

How to do it...

XmlParser requires you to specify an element name exactly as it appears in the parsed XML, including the name of the prefix used in the actual XML content. This makes the code fragile because the namespace prefixes have to match.

1. In order to make code that is based on XmlParser more reliable in respect to namespaces, we can resort to the groovy.xml.Namespace class as shown in the following code:

   import groovy.xml...