Re: SAX 1.0 : handleData and processingInstruction

Lars Marius Garshol (larsga@ifi.uio.no)
18 May 1998 17:39:31 +0200

* Philippe Le Hˇgaret
|
| charecters takes an array of characters for the data :
|
| public abstract void characters(char ch[],
| int start,
| int length) throws SAXException
|
| processingInstruction takes a String for the data :
|
| public abstract void processingInstruction(String target,
| String data) throws SAXException
|
| Why is there this difference in SAX ?

I wasn't "present" when this decision was made, but I'd guess
characters is the way it is because this way is faster in most
implementations, since most parsers keep a character buffer during
parsing and this avoids unecessary buffer copying.

However, doing it this way is obviously less convenient for the user,
who would prefer to just get a String and be done with it. I guess
this is why the current form of processingInstruction was chosen,
since processing instructions rarely occur often in documents and thus
performance is less of an issue.

See also:

<URL:http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/9801/0042.html>
<URL:http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/9801/0087.html>

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