XMLp Bean

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The XMLp component implements a SAX2-compliant XML parser with XPath DOM traversal that can be used to parse and verify the structure of XML documents.

Syntax

IPWorks.Xmlp

Remarks

The XMLp bean parses XML documents and verifies that they are well-formed. The results are provided through a set of events complying with the SAX2 specification.

In addition, the document structure may be queried through an XPath mechanism that supports a subset of the XPath specification.

The parser is optimized for read applications, with a very fast engine that builds internal DOM structures with close to zero heap allocations.

The bean takes pieces of XML code through the Input method, until Flush is called. The document is parsed and fires events like StartElement, EndElement, Characters, IgnorableWhitespace, PI, etc. Entities are evaluated inside the EvalEntity event. If BuildDOM is set to True, an internal DOM structure is created, which in turn enables properties such as XPath, XElement, XText, etc. which allow traversal of the document structure.

When XPath is set to a valid path, XElement points to the name of the element, with XParent, XNamespace, XPrefix, XChildren, and XText providing other properties of the element. The XAttributes collection provides the attributes of the current element.

An additional "relaxed" mode allows for lexical parsing of non-XML documents (e.g. HTML). This is enabled by setting Validate to False. In this case, events will be fired as elements, entities, etc. are encountered, but the structure of the document will not be checked for "well-formedness", and the internal DOM structure will not be built.