Java XML Parsers

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.
• JDOM Parser - Parses the document in similar fashion to DOM parser but in more easier way.
• StAX Parser - Parses the document in similar fashion to SAX parser but in more efficient way.
• XPath Parser - Parses the XML based on expression and is used extensively in conjuction with XSLT.
• DOM4J Parser - A java library to parse XML, XPath and XSLT using Java Collections Framework , provides support for DOM, SAX and JAXP.

There are JAXB and XSLT APIs available to handle XML parsing in Object Oriented way.We'll elboborate each parser in detail in next chapters.