Below is an answer I made to a similar question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3357247/skipping-nodes-with-sax). It demonstrates how to swap content handlers on an XMLReader.
In this example the swapped in ContentHandler simply ignores all events until it gives up control, but you could adapt the concept easily.
You could do something like the following:
import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser;
import javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;
public class Demo {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();
XMLReader xr = sp.getXMLReader();
xr.setContentHandler(new MyContentHandler(xr));
xr.parse("input.xml");
}
}
MyContentHandler
This class is responsible for processing your XML document. When you hit a node you want to ignore you can swap in the IgnoringContentHandler which will swallow all events for that node.
import org.xml.sax.Attributes;
import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler;
import org.xml.sax.Locator;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;
public class MyContentHandler implements ContentHandler {
private XMLReader xmlReader;
public MyContentHandler(XMLReader xmlReader) {
this.xmlReader = xmlReader;
}
public void setDocumentLocator(Locator locator) {
}
public void startDocument() throws SAXException {
}
public void endDocument() throws SAXException {
}
public void startPrefixMapping(String prefix, String uri)
throws SAXException {
}
public void endPrefixMapping(String prefix) throws SAXException {
}
public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
Attributes atts) throws SAXException {
if("sodium".equals(qName)) {
xmlReader.setContentHandler(new IgnoringContentHandler(xmlReader, this));
} else {
System.out.println("START " + qName);
}
}
public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName)
throws SAXException {
System.out.println("END " + qName);
}
public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length)
throws SAXException {
System.out.println(new String(ch, start, length));
}
public void ignorableWhitespace(char[] ch, int start, int length)
throws SAXException {
}
public void processingInstruction(String target, String data)
throws SAXException {
}
public void skippedEntity(String name) throws SAXException {
}
}
IgnoringContentHandler
When the IgnoringContentHandler is done swallowing events it passes control back to your main ContentHandler.
import org.xml.sax.Attributes;
import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler;
import org.xml.sax.Locator;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
import org.xml.sax.XMLReader;
public class IgnoringContentHandler implements ContentHandler {
private int depth = 1;
private XMLReader xmlReader;
private ContentHandler contentHandler;
public IgnoringContentHandler(XMLReader xmlReader, ContentHandler contentHandler) {
this.contentHandler = contentHandler;
this.xmlReader = xmlReader;
}
public void setDocumentLocator(Locator locator) {
}
public void startDocument() throws SAXException {
}
public void endDocument() throws SAXException {
}
public void startPrefixMapping(String prefix, String uri)
throws SAXException {
}
public void endPrefixMapping(String prefix) throws SAXException {
}
public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName,
Attributes atts) throws SAXException {
depth++;
}
public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName)
throws SAXException {
depth--;
if(0 == depth) {
xmlReader.setContentHandler(contentHandler);
}
}
public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length)
throws SAXException {
}
public void ignorableWhitespace(char[] ch, int start, int length)
throws SAXException {
}
public void processingInstruction(String target, String data)
throws SAXException {
}
public void skippedEntity(String name) throws SAXException {
}
}