Parsing an XML string for a list of items

String myString =  "43"

final DocumentBuilder docBuilder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
document = docBuilder.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(myString)));
document.getDocumentElement().normalize();
 
final XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance(),newXPath()
final NodeList sections = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate("/SurfaceIds/SurfaceId", document, XPathConstants.NODESET);

                    if (sections != null) {  //alway check for null here
                        for (int i=0; i< sections.getLength(); i++) {
                            Node node = sections.item(i);
                            String idString = node.getTextContent();
                             ....
                             ...
                            
                        }
                    }