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SAX::Intro(3pm)	      User Contributed Perl Documentation      SAX::Intro(3pm)

NAME
       XML::SAX::Intro - An Introduction to SAX Parsing with Perl

Introduction
       XML::SAX is a new way to work with XML Parsers in Perl. In this article
       we'll discuss why you should be using SAX, why you should be using
       XML::SAX, and we'll see some of the finer implementation details. The
       text below assumes some familiarity with callback, or push based
       parsing, but if you are unfamiliar with these techniques then a good
       place to start is Kip Hampton's excellent series of articles on
       XML.com.

Replacing XML::Parser
       The de-facto way of parsing XML under perl is to use Larry Wall and
       Clark Cooper's XML::Parser. This module is a Perl and XS wrapper around
       the expat XML parser library by James Clark. It has been a hugely
       successful project, but suffers from a couple of rather major flaws.
       Firstly it is a proprietary API, designed before the SAX API was
       conceived, which means that it is not easily replaceable by other
       streaming parsers. Secondly it's callbacks are subrefs. This doesn't
       sound like much of an issue, but unfortunately leads to code like:

	 sub handle_start {
	   my ($e, $el, %attrs) = @_;
	   if ($el eq 'foo') {
	     $e->{inside_foo}++; # BAD! $e is an XML::Parser::Expat object.
	   }
	 }

       As you can see, we're using the $e object to hold our state
       information, which is a bad idea because we don't own that object - we
       didn't create it. It's an internal object of XML::Parser, that happens
       to be a hashref. We could all too easily overwrite XML::Parser internal
       state variables by using this, or Clark could change it to an array ref
       (not that he would, because it would break so much code, but he could).

       The only way currently with XML::Parser to safely maintain state is to
       use a closure:

	 my $state = MyState->new();
	 $parser->setHandlers(Start => sub { handle_start($state, @_) });

       This closure traps the $state variable, which now gets passed as the
       first parameter to your callback. Unfortunately very few people use
       this technique, as it is not documented in the XML::Parser POD files.

       Another reason you might not want to use XML::Parser is because you
       need some feature that it doesn't provide (such as validation), or you
       might need to use a library that doesn't use expat, due to it not being
       installed on your system, or due to having a restrictive ISP. Using SAX
       allows you to work around these restrictions.

Introducing SAX
       SAX stands for the Simple API for XML. And simple it really is.
       Constructing a SAX parser and passing events to handlers is done as
       simply as:

	 use XML::SAX;
	 use MySAXHandler;

	 my $parser = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(
	       Handler => MySAXHandler->new
	 );

	 $parser->parse_uri("foo.xml");

       The important concept to grasp here is that SAX uses a factory class
       called XML::SAX::ParserFactory to create a new parser instance. The
       reason for this is so that you can support other underlying parser
       implementations for different feature sets. This is one thing that
       XML::Parser has always sorely lacked.

       In the code above we see the parse_uri method used, but we could have
       equally well called parse_file, parse_string, or parse(). Please see
       XML::SAX::Base for what these methods take as parameters, but don't be
       fooled into believing parse_file takes a filename. No, it takes a file
       handle, a glob, or a subclass of IO::Handle. Beware.

       SAX works very similarly to XML::Parser's default callback method,
       except it has one major difference: rather than setting individual
       callbacks, you create a new class in which to receive the callbacks.
       Each callback is called as a method call on an instance of that handler
       class. An example will best demonstrate this:

	 package MySAXHandler;
	 use base qw(XML::SAX::Base);

	 sub start_document {
	   my ($self, $doc) = @_;
	   # process document start event
	 }

	 sub start_element {
	   my ($self, $el) = @_;
	   # process element start event
	 }

       Now, when we instantiate this as above, and parse some XML with this as
       the handler, the methods start_document and start_element will be
       called as method calls, so this would be the equivalent of directly
       calling:

	 $object->start_element($el);

       Notice how this is different to XML::Parser's calling style, which
       calls:

	 start_element($e, $name, %attribs);

       It's the difference between function calling and method calling which
       allows you to subclass SAX handlers which contributes to SAX being a
       powerful solution.

       As you can see, unlike XML::Parser, we have to define a new package in
       which to do our processing (there are hacks you can do to make this
       uneccessary, but I'll leave figuring those out to the experts). The
       biggest benefit of this is that you maintain your own state variable
       ($self in the above example) thus freeing you of the concerns listed
       above. It is also an improvement in maintainability - you can place the
       code in a separate file if you wish to, and your callback methods are
       always called the same thing, rather than having to choose a suitable
       name for them as you had to with XML::Parser. This is an obvious win.

       SAX parsers are also very flexible in how you pass a handler to them.
       You can use a constructor parameter as we saw above, or we can pass the
       handler directly in the call to one of the parse methods:

	 $parser->parse(Handler => $handler,
			Source => { SystemId => "foo.xml" });
	 # or...
	 $parser->parse_file($fh, Handler => $handler);

       This flexibility allows for one parser to be used in many different
       scenarios throughout your script (though one shouldn't feel pressure to
       use this method, as parser construction is generally not a time
       consuming process).

Callback Parameters
       The only other thing you need to know to understand basic SAX is the
       structure of the parameters passed to each of the callbacks. In
       XML::Parser, all parameters are passed as multiple options to the
       callbacks, so for example the Start callback would be called as
       my_start($e, $name, %attributes), and the PI callback would be called
       as my_processing_instruction($e, $target, $data). In SAX, every
       callback is passed a hash reference, containing entries that define our
       "node". The key callbacks and the structures they receive are:

   start_element
       The start_element handler is called whenever a parser sees an opening
       tag. It is passed an element structure consisting of:

       LocalName
	   The name of the element minus any namespace prefix it may have come
	   with in the document.

       NamespaceURI
	   The URI of the namespace associated with this element, or the empty
	   string for none.

       Attributes
	   A set of attributes as described below.

       Name
	   The name of the element as it was seen in the document (i.e.
	   including any prefix associated with it)

       Prefix
	   The prefix used to qualify this element's namespace, or the empty
	   string if none.

       The Attributes are a hash reference, keyed by what we have called
       "James Clark" notation. This means that the attribute name has been
       expanded to include any associated namespace URI, and put together as
       {ns}name, where "ns" is the expanded namespace URI of the attribute if
       and only if the attribute had a prefix, and "name" is the LocalName of
       the attribute.

       The value of each entry in the attributes hash is another hash
       structure consisting of:

       LocalName
	   The name of the attribute minus any namespace prefix it may have
	   come with in the document.

       NamespaceURI
	   The URI of the namespace associated with this attribute. If the
	   attribute had no prefix, then this consists of just the empty
	   string.

       Name
	   The attribute's name as it appeared in the document, including any
	   namespace prefix.

       Prefix
	   The prefix used to qualify this attribute's namepace, or the empty
	   string if none.

       Value
	   The value of the attribute.

       So a full example, as output by Data::Dumper might be:

	 ....

   end_element
       The end_element handler is called either when a parser sees a closing
       tag, or after start_element has been called for an empty element (do
       note however that a parser may if it is so inclined call characters
       with an empty string when it sees an empty element. There is no simple
       way in SAX to determine if the parser in fact saw an empty element, a
       start and end element with no content..

       The end_element handler receives exactly the same structure as
       start_element, minus the Attributes entry. One must note though that it
       should not be a reference to the same data as start_element receives,
       so you may change the values in start_element but this will not affect
       the values later seen by end_element.

   characters
       The characters callback may be called in several circumstances. The
       most obvious one is when seeing ordinary character data in the markup.
       But it is also called for text in a CDATA section, and is also called
       in other situations. A SAX parser has to make no guarantees whatsoever
       about how many times it may call characters for a stretch of text in an
       XML document - it may call once, or it may call once for every
       character in the text. In order to work around this it is often
       important for the SAX developer to use a bundling technique, where text
       is gathered up and processed in one of the other callbacks. This is not
       always necessary, but it is a worthwhile technique to learn, which we
       will cover in XML::SAX::Advanced (when I get around to writing it).

       The characters handler is called with a very simple structure - a hash
       reference consisting of just one entry:

       Data
	   The text data that was received.

   comment
       The comment callback is called for comment text. Unlike with
       "characters()", the comment callback *must* be invoked just once for an
       entire comment string. It receives a single simple structure - a hash
       reference containing just one entry:

       Data
	   The text of the comment.

   processing_instruction
       The processing instruction handler is called for all processing
       instructions in the document. Note that these processing instructions
       may appear before the document root element, or after it, or anywhere
       where text and elements would normally appear within the document,
       according to the XML specification.

       The handler is passed a structure containing just two entries:

       Target
	   The target of the processing instrcution

       Data
	   The text data in the processing instruction. Can be an empty string
	   for a processing instruction that has no data element.  For example
	   <?wiggle?> is a perfectly valid processing instruction.

Tip of the iceberg
       What we have discussed above is really the tip of the SAX iceberg. And
       so far it looks like there's not much of interest to SAX beyond what we
       have seen with XML::Parser. But it does go much further than that, I
       promise.

       People who hate Object Oriented code for the sake of it may be thinking
       here that creating a new package just to parse something is a waste
       when they've been parsing things just fine up to now using procedural
       code. But there's reason to all this madness. And that reason is SAX
       Filters.

       As you saw right at the very start, to let the parser know about our
       class, we pass it an instance of our class as the Handler to the
       parser. But now imagine what would happen if our class could also take
       a Handler option, and simply do some processing and pass on our data
       further down the line? That in a nutshell is how SAX filters work. It's
       Unix pipes for the 21st century!

       There are two downsides to this. Number 1 - writing SAX filters can be
       tricky. If you look into the future and read the advanced tutorial I'm
       writing, you'll see that Handler can come in several shapes and sizes.
       So making sure your filter does the right thing can be tricky.
       Secondly, constructing complex filter chains can be difficult, and
       simple thinking tells us that we only get one pass at our document,
       when often we'll need more than that.

       Luckily though, those downsides have been fixed by the release of two
       very cool modules. What's even better is that I didn't write either of
       them!

       The first module is XML::SAX::Base. This is a VITAL SAX module that
       acts as a base class for all SAX parsers and filters. It provides an
       abstraction away from calling the handler methods, that makes sure your
       filter or parser does the right thing, and it does it FAST. So, if you
       ever need to write a SAX filter, which if you're processing XML -> XML,
       or XML -> HTML, then you probably do, then you need to be writing it as
       a subclass of XML::SAX::Base. Really - this is advice not to ignore
       lightly. I will not go into the details of writing a SAX filter here.
       Kip Hampton, the author of XML::SAX::Base has covered this nicely in
       his article on XML.com here <URI>.

       To construct SAX pipelines, Barrie Slaymaker, a long time Perl hacker
       whose modules you will probably have heard of or used, wrote a very
       clever module called XML::SAX::Machines. This combines some really
       clever SAX filter-type modules, with a construction toolkit for filters
       that makes building pipelines easy. But before we see how it makes
       things easy, first lets see how tricky it looks to build complex SAX
       filter pipelines.

	 use XML::SAX::ParserFactory;
	 use XML::Filter::Filter1;
	 use XML::Filter::Filter2;
	 use XML::SAX::Writer;

	 my $output_string;
	 my $writer = XML::SAX::Writer->new(Output => \$output_string);
	 my $filter2 = XML::SAX::Filter2->new(Handler => $writer);
	 my $filter1 = XML::SAX::Filter1->new(Handler => $filter2);
	 my $parser = XML::SAX::ParserFactory->parser(Handler => $filter1);

	 $parser->parse_uri("foo.xml");

       This is a lot easier with XML::SAX::Machines:

	 use XML::SAX::Machines qw(Pipeline);

	 my $output_string;
	 my $parser = Pipeline(
	       XML::SAX::Filter1 => XML::SAX::Filter2 => \$output_string
	       );

	 $parser->parse_uri("foo.xml");

       One of the main benefits of XML::SAX::Machines is that the pipelines
       are constructed in natural order, rather than the reverse order we saw
       with manual pipeline construction. XML::SAX::Machines takes care of all
       the internals of pipe construction, providing you at the end with just
       a parser you can use (and you can re-use the same parser as many times
       as you need to).

       Just a final tip. If you ever get stuck and are confused about what is
       being passed from one SAX filter or parser to the next, then
       Devel::TraceSAX will come to your rescue. This perl debugger plugin
       will allow you to dump the SAX stream of events as it goes by. Usage is
       really very simple just call your perl script that uses SAX as follows:

	 $ perl -d:TraceSAX <scriptname>

       And preferably pipe the output to a pager of some sort, such as more or
       less. The output is extremely verbose, but should help clear some
       issues up.

AUTHOR
       Matt Sergeant, matt@sergeant.org

       $Id$

perl v5.14.2			  2012-06-01		       SAX::Intro(3pm)
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