Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Parsing an XML Document

To process an XML document, you need to parse it. A parser is a program that reads a file, confirms that the file has the correct format, breaks it up into the constituent elements, and lets a programmer access those elements. The Java library supplies two kinds of XML parsers:

• The Document Object Model (DOM) parser reads an XML document into a tree structure.

• The Simple API for XML (SAX) parser generates events as it reads an XML document.

The DOM parser is easier to use for most purposes, and we explain it first. You would consider the SAX parser if you process very long documents whose tree structures would use up a lot of memory, or if you are just interested in a few elements and you don't care about their context. ...