SAX2

Bootstrapping an XMLReader

There are several ways to obtain an XMLReader. Here we’ll look at a few of them, focusing first on the most commonly available ones. These are the “pure SAX” solutions.

It’s good policy to reuse parsers, rather than constantly discard and recreate them. Some parsers are more expensive to create than others, so such reuse can improve performance if you parse many documents. Similarly, factory approaches add some fixed costs to achieve vendor neutrality, and those costs can add up. In contexts like servlets, where any number of threads may need to parse XML concurrently, parsers are often pooled so those bootstrapping costs won’t increase per-request service times.

The XMLReaderFactory Class

The simplest way to get a parser is to use the default parser for your environment, as we saw earlier:

import org.xml.sax.helpers.XMLReaderFactory;

...

XMLReader       parser = null;

try {
    parser = XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader ();
    // success!

} catch (SAXException e) {
    System.err.println ("Can't get default parser: " + e.getMessage ());
}

Normally, the default parser is defined by setting the org.xml.sax.driver system property. Application startup should set that property, normally using JVM invocation flags. (In a very few cases System.setProperty() may be appropriate.)

$ java -Dorg.xml.sax.driver=gnu.xml.aelfred2.XMLReader

Unfortunately, in many cases the original reference implementation of that method is used. This is problematic in two situations: when the system ...