This package contains XML utilities, including a SAX2 DOM parser and a command line utility. Note that all the SAX2 aware classes may also be used (through a ParserAdapter) with parsers that only expose SAX1 APIs, though with a certain graceful degradation of functionality.

The command line utility connects parsers simple processing pipelines. This can be handy for command line validation or transformation tasks, possibly in batch mode, or within Makefiles.

The parsers in this package are:

• A SAX2 DOM Parser, walking a DOM tree and emitting a stream of SAX2 events. The optional SAX2 handlers (for lexical and declaration events) are supported.
• vendor/HtmlParser (and other adapters to various vendor-controlled source) may not be available in your distribution, particularly if you're not bundling Sun's Swing implementation. It's a a SAX2 wrapper for the SWING HTML parser, which makes it easy to process HTML data as a stream of SAX events;

This package includes three handler utilities:

• A SAX2 analogue of the SAX1 HandlerBase class implementing all handlers (including the optional lexical and declaration handlers);
• A handler class which prints all of its input as XML (or XHTML) that will be valid XML if the parser makes the appropriate SAX2 handler calls. This handles a variety of tricky XML syntax issues.
• An EchoHandler subclass which defaults to XHTML and prefers the use of the ASCII encoding in respect of the many system components that can't handle UTF-8, XML declarations, or both.

Two DOM support classes provide APIs to address two fundamental portability problems with the DOM as currently defined by W3C. The DOM Builder provides a way to connect a DOM implementation to an arbitrary SAX parser, including the ones provided in this package. You can configure both the parser and the builder. The DOM Factory addresses a slightly different problem: how to get an empty DOM document.

(Pending: JAXP DOM builder support, and W3C DOM Level 3 support for the same "dom bootstrap" problem.)