XML parsing in Android

SAX PARSING


SAX is an abbreviation for “Simple API for XML”, and it is a very powerful tool for reading XML.


Advantages 
1. low memory footprint.
2. They parse each line of XML data at a time and consequently do not need to load the entire XML document into memory prior to making the data accessible.
3. This is a significant boost to performance, and this really becomes visible when working with large XML documents.

Disadvantages 
1. You must define an event-driven API that will respond to each element as it is received.
2. This can become time consuming to build, but if you are willing to spend a little extra time to get it right, the outcome will be worthwhile.



DOM PARSING

package com.xmlparse.android;

import java.net.URL;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;

import org.w3c.dom.Element;

import org.w3c.dom.Node;

import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

import org.xml.sax.InputSource;

import android.app.Activity;

import android.os.Bundle;

import android.widget.LinearLayout;

import android.widget.TextView;

public class XMLParsingActivity extends Activity {

@Override

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {

     super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);

     setContentView(R.layout.main);

     LinearLayout layout = new LinearLayout(this);

     layout.setOrientation(1);

     TextView name[];

     TextView website[];

     TextView category[];

     try {

          URL url = new URL("http://www.androidpeople.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/example.xml");

          DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

          DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();

          Document doc = db.parse(new InputSource(url.openStream()));

          doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();

          NodeList nodeList = doc.getElementsByTagName("item");

          name = new TextView[nodeList.getLength()];

          website = new TextView[nodeList.getLength()];

          category = new TextView[nodeList.getLength()];

          for (int i = 0; i < nodeList.getLength(); i++) {

               Node node = nodeList.item(i);

               name[i] = new TextView(this);

               website[i] = new TextView(this);

               category[i] = new TextView(this);

               Element fstElmnt = (Element) node;

               NodeList nameList = fstElmnt.getElementsByTagName("name");

               Element nameElement = (Element) nameList.item(0);

               nameList = nameElement.getChildNodes();

               name[i].setText("Name = " + ((Node) nameList.item(0)).getNodeValue());

               

               NodeList websiteList = fstElmnt.getElementsByTagName("website");

               Element websiteElement = (Element) websiteList.item(0);

               websiteList = websiteElement.getChildNodes();

               website[i].setText("Website = " + ((Node)                        websiteList.item(0)).getNodeValue());

               category[i].setText("Website Category = " +                 websiteElement.getAttribute("category"));

               

               layout.addView(name[i]);

               layout.addView(website[i]);

               layout.addView(category[i]);

          }

     } catch (Exception e) {

          System.out.println("XML Pasing Excpetion = " + e);

     }

     setContentView(layout);

}

}