Skip to Content
Professional XML
book

Professional XML

by Thiru Thangarathinam, Bill Evjen, Alessandro Vernet, Sam Ferguson, Kent Sharkey, Michael Kay
April 2007
Intermediate to advanced
886 pages
21h 31m
English
Wrox
Content preview from Professional XML

Chapter 13. Simple API for XML (SAX)

The Simple API for XML (SAX) is an event-driven programming interface for XML parsing. It was developed by the members of the xml-dev mailing list currently hosted by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) (oasis-open.org). SAX is not an XML parser, but instead it is a set of interfaces implemented by many XML parsers. SAX was developed as a standardized way to parse an XML, to enable more efficient analysis of large XML documents. SAX is specified as a set of Java interfaces. Initially, if you were going to do any serious work with it, you had to be doing some Java programming, using JDK 1.1 or later. Now, however, a wide variety of languages have their own version of SAX.

In this chapter, you get an in-depth look at the features of SAX including its architecture, and processing flow through examples. Specifically you learn how to,

  • Configure a SAX parser and parse an XML document

  • Handle elements, attribute lists, character data, and processing instructions

  • Handle errors and warnings using SAX

  • Search for specific elements in an XML document using SAX

  • Write XML elements using SAX

  • Validate an XML document with an XSD schema

  • Understand the advantages and disadvantages of SAX

Introducing XML Parsing

There are two widely used approaches to parsing XML data:

  • Tree-based APIs

  • Simple API for XML (SAX)

The following sections discuss each of these approaches.

Tree-Based APIs

One of the most popular XML APIs at the moment is the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

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

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

Elliotte Rusty Harold

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780471777779Purchase book