Special Edition Using XML, Second Edition

SAX Overview

Unlike the DOM, SAX is not an object model. A SAX parser represents a document using events initiated sequentially while parsing the document tags. For example, the portion of the XML document demonstrated in Listing 15.1 will translate into the following sequence of events:

• startElement

• characters

• endElement

Listing 15.1. Sample XML Document

... <my-element> this is sample text </my-element> ...

SAX Parsers

SAX is designed in such a way that it is very easy to use the API with different implementations of parsers. The only requirement is that parsers should implement a set of standard interfaces—otherwise, there is considerable freedom in implementing SAX-compliant parsers.

Currently, there are several implementations of SAX parsers ...