XML 101 – the basics

Let's go through a brief tour of XML and then we'll move to the sections of our interest. The reason XML was created is that data stored in flat files (or normal data files) are a big nuisance to handle while transporting or reading them. For every flat file, the developer needs to write their own parser that is tailor-made for their purpose. But that's not the case with XML, a generic XML parser is used and the developer only needs to write code to parse the document using the parser, not the parser itself. XML format focuses on code-readability and ease in parsing.

An XML document looks like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<student> 
    <name>James Jones</name>
    <roll >PACKT/1001/16</roll>
    <dob>17-01-1947</dob>
    <address>Birmingham, United Kingdom</address>
</student>

XML elements

As you can see, the XML document contains different tags which contain different types of data...