more help with parsing xml string

[jasonwucinski]

hello all,
I have another question about parsing an xml string. bellow is the xml string i am working with:

alum_string= ""<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<person>
  <id>jIi-hRi4cI</id>
  <first-name>Jason</first-name>
  <last-name>Wucinski</last-name>
  <languages total="2">
    <language>
      <language>
        <name>English</name>
      </language>
      <proficiency>
        <level>native_or_bilingual</level>
      </proficiency>
    </language>
    <language>
      <language>
        <name>Setswana</name>
      </language>
      <proficiency>
        <level>elementary</level>
      </proficiency>
    </language>
  </languages>
</person>
""

I was able to parse single nodes, such as first-name and last-name this way:

def alum = new XmlSlurper().parseText(alum_string)
print  " first name: ${alum.'first-name'} \n"
print  " last name:  ${alum.'last-name'} \n"
//output:
// first name: Jason
//last name: wucinski

but when i try to parse a node that repeats (such as language proficiency) the strings end up being grouped together and cant be separated. below is the code i use to do parse languages:

print("languages: ")
alum.languages.each{languages ->
     print("${alum.languages.language.language.name}  \n")
//output:
//languages: EnglishSetswana  
//languages: EnglishSetswana 
}

the output iterates twice, which is good i guess since there are two languages in the above xml, but the two language names are grouped together. I would expect the output to be:

languages: English
languages: Setswana

what's going on? can anyone help? thanks in advance
jason

[jasonwucinski]

well, not a lot of help here it seems. if anyone else comes a cross a similar problem, i figured this out:

def i = 0	
alum.languages.language.each{name ->
languageName ="${alum.languages.language.'language'[i]}.text()"
languageSkill=	"${alum.languages.language.'proficiency'[i]}.text()"
	i ++
	}

notice the [i]. it seems you can iterate through repeated nodes with this

[pledbrook]

When you iterate over a set of elements, you don't need to keep querying from the document root. So your code can be:

for (lang in alum.languages.language) {
    languageName = lang.language.text()
    languageSkill = lang.proficiency.text()
}

Note that it's preferable in Groovy to use a 'for' loop rather than the each() method.