Difference between SAX and DOM parsers

[Saurabh Agrawal]

Hello folks,
Can anyone let me know what is the difference between SAX and the DOM parsers??

I hope to get some comments on this.

Saurabh

[Lasse Koskela]

SAX is an event-based API, which means that a SAX parser generates events when making its way through an XML document.

DOM, on the other hand, is a tree-based API, which means that a DOM parser creates a DOM tree out of the elements it encounters while making its way through an XML document.

I'd recommend looking up articles named "Understanding SAX" and "Understanding DOM" at IBM developerWorks.

[Damanjit Kaur]

Also SAX is for sequential access and DOM for random access. DOM requires more memory in case of big xml file.