SAX: finalising org.sax.xml.Parser

[David Megginson]

James Clark writes:

 > XML allows the encoding of an entity being specified by an external
 > transport protocol (see 4.3.3): for example, when an XML document
 > arrives over HTTP with a content type of text/xml, then the
 > encoding specified in the charset parameter is supposed to take
 > precedence over that specified in the document entity by the
 > encoding declaration or by XML's default rules.  So I think we need
 > an additional argument here: a String specifying the name of the
 > encoding to be used for the InputStream, or null if the encoding
 > specified in the document entity should be used.

This is a very good point, as was the suggestion earlier (I don't
remember whose it was) that we rearrange arguments in order of
decreasing importance to the programmer.  With those suggestions in
mind, here's my current take on org.xml.sax.Parser:

  package org.xml.sax;

  public interface Parser {

    public abstract void setEntityHandler (EntityHandler handler);
    public abstract void setDocumentHandler (DocumentHandler handler);
    public abstract void setErrorHandler (ErrorHandler handler);

    public abstract void parse (String systemId, String publicId)
      throws java.lang.Exception;

    public abstract void parse (InputStream input, String encoding,
				String systemId, String publicId)
      throws java.lang.Exception;

  }

I haven't included a setValidate() method yet, partly because I'm not
certain what it would really mean.  If I did

  setValidate(false);

would that simply prevent the reporting of validation errors, or would
it also prohibit the parser from resolving external text entities and
the external DTD subset?


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117 at freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins at microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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