Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days, Second Edition

Parsing XML Using SAX

To parse an XML document, you instantiate a javax.xml.parsers.SAXParseFactory object to obtain a SAX-based parser. This parser is then used to read the XML document a character at a time. (In the following code fragment the document is obtained from a command-line argument.)

SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
SAXParser saxParser = factory.newSAXParser();

DefaultHandler handler = new XMLParse();
saxParser.parse( new File(argv[0]), handler );

Your SAX parser class must extend the public class org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler. This class defines stub methods that receive notification (callbacks) when XML entities are parsed. By default, these methods do nothing, but they can be overridden to do anything ...