Hour17.SAX: The Simple API for XML

Hour 17. SAX: The Simple API for XML

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

George Bernard Shaw

If you share Mr. Shaw's propensity for practicality, you will probably find this lesson quite interesting. Through most of this book, the discussion on XML has focused on its use as a structured document format. However, XML is also often used as a format for data storage. Unlike proprietary file formats, XML documents follow consistent structural rules and can be tested not only for well-formedness but also for compliance with specific structural rules. There are a variety of tools out there that allow you to interact with the structure of XML documents. The previous hour focused on one of these technologies, the W3C's Document Object Model (DOM). This hour tackles another such technology, known as SAX. SAX (Simple API for XML) is an API that can be used to analyze and extract data from an XML document.

In this hour, you'll learn

• What SAX is and how it works

• How to get a SAX parser for your favorite programming language

• How to write a Java program that uses a SAX parser to process an XML file