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

Parsing Non-XML Documents

One of the neatest tricks that a SAX filter can perform is presenting something that isn't an XML document as if it were one. The client application doesn't need to know that what it's parsing is really a tab-delimited text file or a relational database if the filter hides all of those details and just presents a view of that source as a well-formed XML document.

There are several advantages to using this approach over actually converting the source. For one, it's a lot more dynamically adaptable to changing data. For another, it's easier to integrate into existing XML processing chains. A small advantage is that you don't need to worry about escaping illegal characters like < and & because these would normally be unescaped ...