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Alessandro A. Garbagnati

Create a new class (there are people that consider this a waste and use anonymous classes) that implements the FilenameFilter.
This is an example for filtering all the XML files in a directory:

import java.io.*;

public class FilterXMLFile implements FilenameFilter {

    /**
     *  you just need to implement the accept method
     */
    public boolean accept(File dir, String name) {
        return name.endsWith(".xml");
    }
}

Then, in your code, you can do something like this:

File myDir = new File(<the directory>);
File[] xmlFiles = myDir.listFiles(new FilterXMLFile());

You can do the same thing with a FileFilter.