Simple API For XML - Example

Example

Given the following XML document:

This XML document, when passed through a SAX parser, will generate a sequence of events like the following:

• XML Element start, named DocumentElement, with an attribute param equal to "value"
• XML Element start, named FirstElement
• XML Text node, with data equal to "¶ Some Text" (note: certain white spaces can be changed)
• XML Element end, named FirstElement
• Processing Instruction event, with the target some_pi and data some_attr="some_value" (the content after the target is just text; however, it is very common to imitate the syntax of XML attributes, as in this example)
• XML Element start, named SecondElement, with an attribute param2 equal to "something"
• XML Text node, with data equal to "Pre-Text"
• XML Element start, named Inline
• XML Text node, with data equal to "Inlined text"
• XML Element end, named Inline
• XML Text node, with data equal to "Post-text."
• XML Element end, named SecondElement
• XML Element end, named DocumentElement

Note that the first line of the sample above is the XML Declaration and not a processing instruction; as such it will not be reported as a processing instruction event (although some SAX implementations provide a separate event just for the XML declaration).

The result above may vary: the SAX specification deliberately states that a given section of text may be reported as multiple sequential text events. Many parsers, for example, return separate text events for numeric character references. Thus in the example above, a SAX parser may generate a different series of events, part of which might include:

• XML Element start, named FirstElement
• XML Text node, with data equal to "¶" (the Unicode character U+00b6)
• XML Text node, with data equal to " Some Text"
• XML Element end, named FirstElement