Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

ContentHandler

Synopsis

This interface is the key one for XML parsing with the SAX API. An XMLReader tells your application about the content of the XML document it is parsing by invoking the various methods of the ContentHandler interface. In order to parse documents with SAX, you must implement this interface to define methods that take whatever actions are necessary when they are invoked by the parser. Because this interface is so critical to the SAX API, the methods are explained individually below:

setDocumentLocator( )

The parser usually calls this method (but is not required to do so) before calling any others to pass a Locator object to the ContentHandler. Locator defines methods that return the current line and column number of the document being parsed, and if the parser supplies a Locator object, it guarantees that its methods will return valid values during any other ContentHandler invocations that follow. A ContentHandler can call the methods of this object when printing error messages, for example.

startDocument( ), endDocument( )

The parser calls these methods once, at the beginning and end of parsing. startDocument( ) is the first method called except for the optional setDocumentLocator( ) call, and endDocument( ) is always the last method call on a ContentHandler.

startElement( ), endElement( )

The parser calls these methods for each start tag and end tag it encounters. Both are passed three arguments describing the name of the tag: if the parser is doing namespace ...