Android XML Parsing technique selection

Question

There are methods like DOM , SAX and XmlPull parsing in android. How do i decide which parsing has to be used in a particular situation ? Please suggest which 1 is more optimal at particular situations

Answer 1

i am giving you some information about SAX and Dom Parser.

SAX XML Parser in Java

SAX Stands for Simple API for XML Parsing. This is an event based XML Parsing and it parse XML file step by step so much suitable for large XML Files. SAX XML Parser fires event when it encountered opening tag, element or attribute and the parsing works accordingly. It’s recommended to use SAX XML parser for parsing large xml files in Java because it doesn't require to load whole XML file in Java and it can read a big XML file in small parts. Java provides support for SAX parser and you can parse any xml file in Java using SAX Parser, I have covered example of reading xml file using SAX Parser here. One disadvantage of using SAX Parser in java is that reading XML file in Java using SAX Parser requires more code in comparison of DOM Parser.

Difference between DOM and SAX XML Parser Here are few high level differences between DOM parser and SAX Parser in Java:

1) DOM parser loads whole xml document in memory while SAX only loads small part of XML file in memory.

2) DOM parser is faster than SAX because it access whole XML document in memory.

3) SAX parser in Java is better suitable for large XML file than DOM Parser because it doesn't require much memory.

4) DOM parser works on Document Object Model while SAX is an event based xml parser.

That’s all on difference between SAX and DOM parsers in Java, now it’s up to you on which XML parser you going to choose. I recommend use DOM parser over SAX parser if XML file is small enough and go with SAX parser if you don’t know size of xml files to be processed or they are large.

There is also XMLPullParser for XML parsing but i dont have more idea about that because i didn't used it.