What xml parser should I use?

Question

I have a somewhat large file (~500KiB) with a lot of small elements (~3000). I want to pick one element out of this and parse it to a java class.

Attributes Simplified

<xml>     
<attributes>
  <attribute>
     <id>4</id>
     <name>Test</id>
  </attribute>

  <attribute>
     <id>5</id>
     <name>Test2</name>
  </attribute>

<!--3000 more go here-->
</attributes>

class Simplified

public class Attribute{
  private int id;
  private String name;

  //Mutators and accessors

}

I kinda like XPath, but people suggested Stax and even VDT-XML. What should I do.

Answer 1

500 kb is not that large. If you like XPath, go for it.

Answer 2

Whenever I have to deal with XML I just use XMLBeans. It may be overkill for what you are after, but it makes life easy (once you know how to use it).

Answer 3

If you don't care about performance at all, Apache Digester may be useful for you, as it will already initialize the Java objects for you after you define the rules.

Answer 4

Avoid anything that is a DOM parser - no need for that, especially with a large-ish file and relatively simple XML syntax.

Which specific one to use, sorry, I haven't used them, so I can't give you any more guidance than to look at your licensing, performance, and support (for questions).

Answer 5

My favorite XML library is Dom4j

Answer 6

I have commented above as well, because there are few options to consider - but by the sound of it your initial description I think you could get away with a simple SAX processor here: which will probably run faster (although it might not look as pretty when it comes to mapping the Java class) than other mechanisms:

There is an example here, which matches quite closely with your example:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=26351&seqNum=6

Answer 7

I kinda like XPath, but people suggested Stax and even VDT-XML. What should I do.

DOM, SAX and VTD-XML are all three different ways to parse a XML document. Roughly in this order of memory efficiency. DOM needs over 5 times of memory as XML file big is. SAX is only a bit more efficient, VTD-XML uses only a little more memory than the XML file big is, about 1.2 times.

XPath is just a way to select elements and/or data from a (parsed) XML document.

With other words, you can just use XPath in combination with any of the XML parsers. So this is after all a non-concern. If you just want to go for best memory efficiency and performance, go for VTD-XML.