Thanks for the pattern matching tip. Will investigate.

I'm looking for a better way to navigate of graphs. Objects graphs, DOMs, parse trees.

Currently, I rely on iteration and glob style paths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)

For instance, excerpt from https://code.google.com/p/lox/source/browse/trunk/test/lox/t...

  InputStream in = new FileInputStream( "./test/lox/test/zooinventory.xml" );
  Document doc = LOXHandler.load( in );
  List<Element> animals = doc.find( "Inventory/Animal" );
  System.out.println( "animals found: " + animals.size() );

  for( Element animal : animals )
  {
    String habitat = animal.findFirstString( "Habitat" );
    String lifestyle = animal.findFirstString( "Lifestyle" );
    ...
  }

  ...

  // Actual example of some globbing
  List<Element> names = doc.find( "Inventory/*/Name" );
  System.out.println( "names found: " + names.size() );

What I really want in a future language is for those glob paths to be first order objects, not magical strings. Then the compiler can do some sanity checking, editor can do autocompletion, etc.

Warning: Lightweight Objects for XML is a personal project, very alpha. https://code.google.com/p/lox/