Sax¶

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This page was migrated from the old MoinMoin-based wiki. Information may be outdated or no longer applicable. For current documentation, see python.org.

“Sax” is an XML parser that operates element by element, line by line.

MiniDom sucks up an entire XML file, holds it in memory, and lets you work with it. Sax, on the other hand, emits events as it goes step by step through the file.

NOTE: A similarly fast but much simpler way to extract information from an XML document in an event-driven, memory efficient fashion is ElementTree.iterparse().

Example¶

   1 import xml.sax
   2 
   3 class InkscapeSvgHandler(xml.sax.ContentHandler):
   4     def startElement(self, name, attrs):
   5         if name == "svg":
   6             for (k,v) in attrs.items():
   7                 print k + " " + v
   8 
   9 parser = xml.sax.make_parser()
  10 parser.setContentHandler(InkscapeSvgHandler())
  11 parser.parse(open("svg.xml","r"))

Links¶

HtmlParser – similar module, tailored to HTML interpretation
Python Library Reference, xml.sax – API documentation
Python XML FAQ and How-to – describes sax & MiniDom
SAX: The Simple API for XML – wordy tutorial
Charming Python:Revisiting XML tools for Python – kind of old
Usings SAX for Proper XML Output

GeezerVison

Sax¶

Example¶

Links¶