Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

InputSource

Synopsis

This simple class describes a source of input for an XMLReader. An InputSource object can be passed to the parse( ) method of XMLReader, and is also the return value of the EntityResolver.resolveEntity( ) method.

Create an InputSource( ) with one of the constructor methods, specifying the system identifier (a URL) of the file to be parsed, or specifying a byte or character stream that the parser should read the document from. In addition to calling the constructor, you may also want to call setSystemId( ) to specify and/or setPublicId( ) to provide identifiers for the document being parsed. Having a filename or URL is useful if an error arises, and your ErrorHandler object needs to print an error message, for example. If you specify the document to parse as a URL or as a byte stream, you can also call setEncoding( ) to specify the character encoding of the document. The parser will use this encoding value if you supply it, but XML documents are supposed to describe their own encoding in the <?xml?> declaration, so the parser ought to be able to determine the encoding of the document even if you do not call setEncoding( ).

This class allows you to specify more than one input source. The XMLReader will first call getCharacterStream( ) and use the returned Reader if there is one. If that method returns false, then it calls getByteStream( ) and uses the InputStream it returns. Finally, if no character or byte stream is found, then the parser will call getSystemId( ...