23.1 An Overview of XML Parsing

When your application must parse XML documents, your first, fundamental choice is what kind of parsing to use. You can use event-driven parsing, where the parser reads the document sequentially and calls back to your application each time it parses a significant aspect of the document (such as an element). Or you can use object-based parsing, where the parser reads the whole document and builds in-memory data structures, representing the document, that you can then navigate. SAX is the main, normal way to perform event-driven parsing, and DOM is the main, normal way to perform object-based parsing. In each case there are alternatives, such as direct use of expat for event-driven parsing and pyRXP for object-based parsing, but I do not cover these alternatives in this book. Another interesting possibility is offered by pulldom, which is covered later in this chapter.

Event-driven parsing requires fewer resources, which makes it particularly suitable when you need to parse very large documents. However, event-driven parsing requires you to structure your application accordingly, performing your processing (and typically building auxiliary data structures) in your methods that are called by the parser. Object-based parsing gives you more flexibility about the ways in which you can structure your application. It may be more suitable when you need to perform very complicated processing, as long as you can afford the extra resources needed for object-based parsing (typically, this means that you are not dealing with very large documents). Object-based approaches also support programs that need to modify or create XML documents, as covered later in this chapter.

As a general guideline, when you are still undecided after studying the various trade-offs, I suggest you try event-driven parsing when you can see a reasonably direct way to perform your program's tasks through this approach. Event-driven parsing is more scalable; therefore, if your program can perform its task via event-driven parsing, it will be applicable to larger documents than it would be able to handle otherwise. If event-driven parsing is too confining, try pulldom instead. I suggest you consider (non-pull) DOM only when you think DOM is the only way to perform your program's tasks without excessive contortions. In that case DOM may be best, as long as you can accept the resulting limitations, in terms of the maximum size of documents that your program is able to support and the costs in time and memory for processing.