Question

I using SAX to parse XML & fetch number of elements from it.

In XML, there exists <item> tag number of times(easily > 50). But I want to fetch it only first 20.

Code of calling XMLHanlder:

XMLHandler handler = new XMLHandler();
xmlReader.setContentHandler(handler);
xmlReader.parse(new InputSource(in));

Code for XMLHandler:

public class XMLHanlder extends DefaultHandler {

    @Override
    public void startDocument() throws SAXException {
    ...
    }

    @Override
    public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
        Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {
    ...
    }


    @Override
    public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName)
        throws SAXException {
    ...
    }

    @Override
    public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) throws SAXException {
    ...
    }
}

Is there any way that startElement()/endElement() does not get called more than 20 times.

If not is there any workaround?

Thanks

Answer 1

SAX does not offer any such functionality. A workaround is simply to use a counter:

public class XMLHandler extends DefaultHandler {

   private int counter = 0;

   @Override
   public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
                                       Attributes attributes) throws SAXException {

      if (counter < 20) {
            ...
      } else {
         return;
      }
    }

   @Override
   public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName)
                                                    throws SAXException {
      counter++;
      ....
   }
   ...
} 

Optional here are the explicit assignment to 0 for the counter value (will take that value by default).