SAX2

Chapter 5. Other SAX Classes

The preceding chapters have addressed all of the most important SAX2 classes and interfaces. You may need to use a handful of other classes, including simple implementations of a few more interfaces and SAX1 support. This chapter briefly presents those remaining classes and interfaces.

Your parser distribution should have SAX2 support, with complete javadoc for these classes. Consult that documentation if you need more information than found in this book. The API summary in Appendix A should also be helpful.

Helper Classes

There are several classes in the org.xml.sax.helpers package that you will probably find useful from time to time.

The AttributesImpl Class

This is a general-purpose implementation of the SAX2 Attributes interface. As well as reading attribute information (as defined in the interface), you can write and modify it. This class is quite handy when your application code is producing SAX2 events, perhaps because it is converting data structures to a SAX event stream.

Remember the attributes provided to the ContentHandler.startElement() event callback are only valid for the duration of that call. If you need a copy of those attributes for later use, it’s simplest to use this class; just create a new instance using the copy constructor. That copy constructor is one of the most widely used APIs in this class, other than the Attributes methods.

It’s often handy to keep a stack around to track the currently open elements and attributes. ...