Thread: Printing xml to the console from .wmdb without printing junks

Hi guys

Further to a previous post that i made i've been trying to print some xml from a .wmdb (windows media database) file. The file itself basically stores metadata about media that has been played using windows media player. However the file also contains lots of other junk in it and not just xml, but i'm only concerned with printing the xml from the file to the consle for now. The follwoing is some xml taken from the file:

< M E T A D A T A x m l n s : s q l = " u r n : s c h e m a s - m i c r o s o f t - c o m : x m l - s q l " >

< M D R - C D >

< v e r s i o n > 4 . 0 < / v e r s i o n >

< W M C o l l e c t i o n I D > 9 9 9 F B C 3 A - E 1 E A - 4 F 9 A - A B 8 3 - A 9 A 8 C A 0 D F 7 F B < / W M C o l l e c t i o n I D >

< W M C o l l e c t i o n G r o u p I D > 9 9 9 F B C 3 A - E 1 E A - 4 F 9 A - A B 8 3 - A 9 A 8 C A 0 D F 7 F B < / W M C o l l e c t i o n G r o u p I D >

< m d q R e q u e s t I D / >

< u n i q u e F i l e I D > A M G a _ i d = R 2 0 6 7 1 4 < / u n i q u e F i l e I D >

< a l b u m T i t l e > M T V U n p l u g g e d i n N e w Y o r k < / a l b u m T i t l e >

< a l b u m A r t i s t > N i r v a n a < / a l b u m A r t i s t >

< r e l e a s e D a t e > 1 9 9 4 - 1 1 - 0 1 < / r e l e a s e D a t e >

< l a b e l > D i v i n e R e c o r d i n g s < / l a b e l >

< g e n r e > R o c k < / g e n r e >

< p r o v i d e r S t y l e > R o c k < / p r o v i d e r S t y l e >

< p u b l i s h e r R a t i n g > 9 < / p u b l i s h e r R a t i n g >

The code that i'm using is as follows. It's basically the same as the DOMParseExample on this website. For the meantime i've just tried to get the program to read the tag WM Collection ID as you can see below.

However the program seems to compile with no errors, but when i try to run it i get the following error:
[Fatal Error] CurrentDatabase_360.wmdb:1:1: Content is not allowed in prolog.
org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Content is not allowed in prolog.
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.parsers.DOMPars er.parse(DOMParser.java:264)
at com.sun.org.apache.xerces.internal.jaxp.DocumentBu ilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:292)
at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBu ilder.java:172)
at DOMParseExample.main(DOMParseExample.java:16)

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;
import java.io.*;
 
public class DOMParseExample {
 
public static void main(String[] args) {
 
  File file = new File("CurrentDatabase_360.wmdb");
 
  try {
  DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
  Document doc = builder.parse(file);
 
  NodeList nodes = doc.getElementsByTagName("Metadata");
 
  for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
 
     Element element = (Element) nodes.item(i);
 
     NodeList WMCollectionID = element.getElementsByTagName("WMCollectionID");
     Element line = (Element) WMCollectionID.item(0);
 
     System.out.println("WM Collection ID: " + line.getFirstChild().getTextContent());
 
     System.out.println();
  }
  }
  catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
  }
  }
}

I'm not sure whether this is because the program doesn't recognize the file or maybe it's because there is other data in the file asides from xml.

Any help on this would be much appreciated as i'm stumped!

Thanks

John

Originally Posted by JavaPF

Hey John,

When I open this file with notepad there is soooooo much junk in it. You will never be able to parse this without editing out the rubbish first.

Maybe you should write a program to read in the .wmdb file, clean it, and write the XML out to another file. Then you can parse that...

Try using that code above with a file that contains just the wmdb XML.

Hey thanks for taking time to look at the file, it's much appreciated.

I'm just curious do you think using regular expressions to parse the xml would work?

John

To be honest the xml for each piece of media appears quite randomely. Generally the xml tags for each piece of media are similar however some of the media contains xml that others don't. The file i sent you was one of the smaller ones, but some of the larger ones i've looked at can be quite messy.

The xml above was one of the better structured pieces of xml i found, but not all are like that as you've seen from the file. I copied some of the xml into an xml file and tidied it up manually and it worked, but preferably i'd like something that could read the xml straight from the .wmdb file or even copy to a text file and read direct from that instead of me having to tidy up the file by removing data, but perhaps i'm being too unrealistic.

One of the problems i've found with the xml however is that each tag seems to contain whitespace between each character which is a problem when using the DOMParse. It means i have to go through each tag and remove all the whitespace which would take me hours. This is why i was thinking that by using regular expressions i could parse the whitespace also?

Perhaps i'm wrong though as i'm not really too familar with regular expressions.

John

Originally Posted by JavaPF

This is so nasty. I've wrote a program to look for the XML elements in the .wmdb file but in the file you sent me, I can't pick up any of the tags like you posted above.

Hey thanks for taking time to look at it. I'm still working on it, but i've got another problem!

I'll post it in a new thread though