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Asked: 2026-05-10T13:32:38+00:00

I’m currently trying to read in an XML file, make some minor changes (alter

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I’m currently trying to read in an XML file, make some minor changes (alter the value of some attributes), and write it back out again.

I have intended to use a StAX parser (javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader) to read in each event, see if it was one I wanted to change, and then pass it straight on to the StAX writer (javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader) if no changes were required.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t look to be so simple – The writer has no way to take an event type and a parser object, only methods like writeAttribute and writeStartElement. Obviously I could write a big switch statement with a case for every possible type of element which can occur in an XML document, and just write it back out again, but it seems like a lot of trouble for something which seems like it should be simple.

Is there something I’m missing that makes it easy to write out a very similar XML document to the one you read in with StAX?

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1 Answer

  1. StAX works pretty well and is very fast. I used it in a project to parse XML files which are up to 20MB. I don’t have a thorough analysis, but it was definitely faster than SAX.

    As for your question: The difference between streaming and event-handling, AFAIK is control. With the streaming API you can walk through your document step by step and get the contents you want. Whereas the event-based API you can only handle what you are interested in.

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