can i use DOM.. to see if xml is well formed

[lavnish lalchandani]

Hi
I am getting a string from user and need to check whether its well formed
( no need to validate against schema )
for the same i am using the following code ...

        InputSource is = new InputSource(new StringReader("<ok></ok>")); // sax
        DocumentBuilderFactory domFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder domBuilder;
        try {
            domBuilder = domFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
            domBuilder.parse(is);
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (SAXException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

but its using SAX ... which "principally" is advisable to use for big xml files ...
I am aware that i will be getting a small xml file from user

two questions here
(i) Which way is better shud i use DOM or SAX ? why ? ( for my usecase i think DOM )
(ii) saw the APIs for DocumentBuilder.parse( ) as i am getting a String object from user cant give input as File , URI , StringBufferInputStream (deprecated) .. so is using SAX the only way ?
[ April 15, 2008: Message edited by: lavnish lalchandani ]

[William Brogden]

Personally I would use SAX just to save time and memory. It is important to note that you can get useful information about the position of a parsing error out of a SAXParseException so I would catch that first.

Being able to tell your user the line and column of the error could be very helpful.

Note that DOM parsers really use a SAX parser underneath.

Bill