Apache Xerces XML Parsers

What is Apache Xerces2?

Xerces2 is a java based processor and provides standard interfaces and implementations for following XML parsing API standards:

• Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3
• Simple API for XML (SAX) 2.0.2
• Streaming API For XML (StAX) 1.0 Event API
• Java APIs for XML Processing (JAXP) 1.4

What is XML Parsing?

Parsing XML refers to going through XML document to access data or to modify data in one or other way.

What is XML Parser?

XML Parser provides way how to access or modify data present in an XML document. Java provides multiple options to parse XML document. Following are various types of parsers which are commonly used to parse XML documents.

• Dom Parser - Parses the document by loading the complete contents of the document and creating its complete hiearchical tree in memory.
• SAX Parser - Parses the document on event based triggers. Does not load the complete document into the memory.
• StAX Parser - Parses the document in similar fashion to SAX parser but in more efficient way.

We'll elboborate each parser using Apache Xerces library in detail in next chapters.