Working with complex structures
The first section of the chapter explained the different ways to work with simple fields. It's common, however, to have complex structures to work with. One of the most common situations is having to parse results from a web service or a rest call, which returns data in XML or JSON format. This section explains how to parse this kind of complex data.
Working with XML
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is basically a language designed to describe data and it's broadly used not only to store data, but also to exchange data between heterogeneous systems over the internet. In this section, we will describe what an XML structure looks like and how to parse it with PDI.
Introducing XML terminology
Before starting work with XML, let's look at a brief introduction to the structure and basic terminology. Look at this piece of XML showing information about countries:
<world>
...
<country>
<name>Japan</name>
<capital>...
