Processing XML with Java™: A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX

Receiving Elements

In a very real sense, SAX reports tags, not elements. When the parser encounters a start-tag, it calls the startElement() method. When the parser encounters an end-tag, it calls the endElement() method. When the parser encounters an empty-element tag, it calls the startElement() method and then the endElement() method.

Caution

Parsers and ContentHandlers are not thread safe or reentrant. Whereas it's straightforward to design a SAX program that operates on multiple documents in series, it is almost impossible to design one that operates on multiple documents in parallel. If you need to perform XML parsing in multiple, simultaneous threads, give each thread its own XMLReader and ContentHandler objects. Similarly, if you want ...