Question

So I am currently working on an internal tool and this problem came up. I am trying to parse this xml file every 10 seconds until it finds a particular tag. However this xml file gets modified as users click and do a bunch of stuff. i have a loop that opens a new fileinputstream and parses the xml file. But I keep getting a Premature End of File error. Does anyone know how to handle this?

  while(notfound)
  {    
       fis = new FileInputStream(new File("c:/tmp/abc.xml"));
       SaxParser.parse(fis, sampleHandler);
       notFound = sampleHandler.checkIfFound();
  }

Answer 1

XML files must be well formed. Each opened tag must be closed.

XML file may be parsed only after closed by its writer, as a whole.

XML file isn’t a stream, it’s a file.

I you want to parse an XML source as a stream you have to process well formed fragment as records.

Imagine this structure:

<log-file>
   <log-record date="...">
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
   </log-record>

   <log-record date="...">
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
   </log-record>

   <log-record date="...">
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
      <log-event text="..." />
   </log-record>

<log-file>

A file reader (not a parser) may extract well-formed fragment beginning by . An XML parser may parse the extracted fragment.