Getting Child Nodes With XPath.evaluate on an Element as Opposed to a Node

[baiguai]

I am trying to get an Element's child nodes using XPath, but I keep getting a 'cannot find symbol' error where I call XPath.evaluate. I think the trouble is I am passing in an Element not a Node (the examples I've seen online pass in a Node) - but I need to use the methods available to the Element object elsewhere so I don't have a Node object to pass in. Here is the code in question:

    public static NodeList GetChildElements(Element parent, String xpath)
    {
        XPathFactory factory = XPathFactory.newInstance();
        XPath xp = factory.newXPath();
        NodeList nodes = null;
        
        nodes = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate(xpath, parent, XPathConstants.NODESET);

        return nodes;
    }

How would I go about getting a NodeList from an Element using xpath? If I need to pass in a Node, how would I convert my Element to a Node?

Thank you in advance!

[baiguai]

Eeeeesh this is driving me NUTS. I've gone through and modified my code so I can pass in a Node instead of an Element - I'm still getting the error:

cannot find symbol
symbol : method evaluate(org.w3c.dom.Document,org.w3c.dom.Node,jav ax.xml.namespace.QName)
location: interface javax.xml.xpath.XPath
return (NodeList)xPath.evaluate(xmlDocument, node, XPathConstants.NODESET);

All the mentioned classes are being imported so I'm not sure what the trouble is.

[2by4]

I am trying to get an Element's child nodes using XPath, but I keep getting a 'cannot find symbol' error where I call XPath.evaluate.

You are not calling XPath.evaluate()

[baiguai]

Oh! I don't call evaluate() on my XPath instance? I'll try calling it on XPath, see if that works. All the examples I've seen so far call evaluate() on an instance of XPath (XPath: evaluate(String expression, Object item) : XPath*«*javax.xml.xpath*«*Java by API).

Thanks!

[kjkrum]

The trouble is that you're trying to pass a Document instead of a String.

[2by4]

Post your import statements.