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How to feed the Java stax parser with chunks of strings and not InputStreams?

I know Java stax parser works with InputStreams. However, I would need to manually push chunks of strings to the parser instead of inputstream.
Would it be possible?
Kind regards,

You can use a ByteArrayInputStream wrapping around your String chunks' bytes.
Quick example
XMLInputFactory factory = XMLInputFactory.newFactory();
XMLStreamReader reader = factory.createXMLStreamReader(
new ByteArrayInputStream("<start></start>".getBytes("UTF-8"))
);
while (reader.hasNext()) {
int event = reader.next();
switch (event) {
case (XMLStreamConstants.START_ELEMENT): {
System.out.println(reader.getLocalName());
break;
}
}
}
Output
start

Fastest way to read a large XML file in Java

I'm working on a java project to optimize existing code. Currently i'm using BufferedReader/FileInputStream to read content of an XML file as String in Java.
But my question is , is there any faster way to read XML content.Are SAX/DOM faster than BufferedReader/FileInputStream?
Need help regarding the above issue.
Thanks in advance.

I think that your code shown in other question is faster than DOM-like parsers which would definitely require more memory and likely some computation in order to reconstruct the document in full. You may want to profile the code though.
I also think that your code can be prettified a bit for streaming processing if you would use javax XMLStreamReader, which I found quite helpful for many tasks. That class is "... is designed to be the lowest level and most efficient way to read XML data", according to Oracle.
Here is the excerpt from my code where I parse StackOverflow users XML file distributed as a public data dump:
// the input file location
private static final String fileLocation = "/media/My Book/Stack/users.xml";
// the target elements
private static final String USERS_ELEMENT = "users";
private static final String ROW_ELEMENT = "row";
// get the XML file handler
//
FileInputStream fileInputStream = new FileInputStream(fileLocation);
XMLStreamReader xmlStreamReader = XMLInputFactory.newInstance().createXMLStreamReader(
fileInputStream);
// reading the data
//
while (xmlStreamReader.hasNext()) {
int eventCode = xmlStreamReader.next();
// this triggers _users records_ logic
//
if ((XMLStreamConstants.START_ELEMENT == eventCode)
&& xmlStreamReader.getLocalName().equalsIgnoreCase(USERS_ELEMENT)) {
// read and parse the user data rows
//
while (xmlStreamReader.hasNext()) {
eventCode = xmlStreamReader.next();
// this breaks _users record_ reading logic
//
if ((XMLStreamConstants.END_ELEMENT == eventCode)
&& xmlStreamReader.getLocalName().equalsIgnoreCase(USERS_ELEMENT)) {
break;
}
else {
if ((XMLStreamConstants.START_ELEMENT == eventCode)
&& xmlStreamReader.getLocalName().equalsIgnoreCase(ROW_ELEMENT)) {
// extract the user data
//
User user = new User();
int attributesCount = xmlStreamReader.getAttributeCount();
for (int i = 0; i < attributesCount; i++) {
user.setAttribute(xmlStreamReader.getAttributeLocalName(i),
xmlStreamReader.getAttributeValue(i));
}
// all other user record-related logic
//
}
}
}
}
}
That users file format is quite simple and similar to your Bank.xml file:
<users>
<row Id="1567200" Reputation="1" CreationDate="2012-07-31T23:57:57.770" DisplayName="XXX" EmailHash="XXX" LastAccessDate="2012-08-01T00:55:12.953" Views="0" UpVotes="0" DownVotes="0" />
...
</users>

There are different parser options available.
Consider using a streaming parser, because the DOM may become quite big. I.e. either a push or a pull parser.
It's not as if XML parsers are necessarily slow. Consider your web browser. It does XML parsing all the time, and tries really hard to be robust to syntax errors. Usually, memory is the bigger issue.

Creating an XML based on another XML in Java

I'd like to take an XML file, heavily structured and about half gig in size, and create from it another XML file, containing only selected elements of the original one.
1) How can I do that?
2) can it be done with DOM Parser? What is the size limit of the DOM parser?
Thanks!

If you have a very large source XML (like your 0.5 GB file), and wish to extract information from it, possibly creating a new XML, you might consider using an event-based parser which does not require loading the entire XML in memory. The simplest of these implementations is the SAX parser, which requires that you write an event listener which will capture events like document-start, element-start, element-end, etc, where you can inspect the data you are reading (the name of the element, the attributes, etc.) and decide if you are going to ignore it or do something with the data.
Search for a SAX tutorial using JAXP and you should find several examples. Another strategy which you might want to consider, depending on what you want to do is StAX.
Here is a simple example using SAX to read data from a XML file and extract some information based on search criteria. It's a very simple example I use to teach SAX processing. I think it might help your understanding of how it works. The search criteria is hardwired and consists of names of movie directors to search in a giant XML with a movie selection generated from IMDB data.
XML Source example ("source.xml" ~300MB file)
<Movies>
...
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt1527186</Imdb>
<Title>Melancholia</Title>
<Director>Lars von Trier</Director>
<Year>2011</Year>
<Duration>136</Duration>
</Movie>
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt0060390</Imdb>
<Title>Fahrenheit 451</Title>
<Director>François Truffaut</Director>
<Year>1966</Year>
<Duration>112</Duration>
</Movie>
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt0062622</Imdb>
<Title>2001: A Space Odyssey</Title>
<Director>Stanley Kubrick</Director>
<Year>1968</Year>
<Duration>160</Duration>
</Movie>
...
</Movies>
Here is an example of an event handler. It selects the Movie elements by matching strings. I extended DefaultHandler and implemented startElement() (called when an opening tag is found), characters() (called when a block of characters are read), endElement() (called when an end tag is found) and endDocument() (called once, when the document finished). Since the data that is read is not retained in memory, you have to save the data you are interested in yourself. I used some boolean flags and instance variables to save the current tag, current data, etc.
class ExtractMovieSaxHandler extends DefaultHandler {
// These are some parameters for the search which will select
// the subtrees (they will receive data when we set up the parser)
private String tagToMatch;
private String tagContents; // OR match
private boolean strict = false; // if strict matches will be exact
/**
* Sets criteria to select and copy Movie elements from source XML.
*
* #param tagToMatch Must contain text only
* #param tagContents Text contents of the tag
* #param strict If true, match must be exact
*/
public void setSearchCriteria(String tagToMatch, String tagContents, boolean strict) {
this.tagToMatch = tagToMatch;
this.tagContents = tagContents;
this.strict = strict;
}
// These are the temporary values we store as we parse the file
private String currentElement;
private StringBuilder contents = null; // if not null we are in Movie tag
private String currentData;
List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>(); // store resulting nodes here
private boolean skip = false;
...
These methods are the implementation of the ContentHandler. The first one detects an element was found (start tag). We save the name of the tag (child of Movie) in a variable, because it might be one we use in the search:
...
#Override
public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes atts) throws SAXException {
// Store the current element that started now
currentElement = qName;
// If this is a Movie tag, save the contents because we might need it
if (qName.equals("Movie")) {
contents = new StringBuilder();
}
}
...
This one is called every time a block of characters is called. We check if those characters are occurring inside an element which interests us. If it is, we match the contents and save it if it matches.
...
#Override
public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length) throws SAXException {
// if we discovered that we don't need this data, we skip it
if (skip || currentElement == null) {
return;
}
// If we are inside the tag we want to search, save the contents
currentData = new String(ch, start, length);
if (currentElement.equals(tagToMatch)) {
boolean discard = true;
if (strict) {
if (currentData.equals(tagContents)) { // exact match
discard = false;
}
} else {
if (currentData.toLowerCase().indexOf(tagContents.toLowerCase()) >= 0) { // matches occurrence of substring
discard = false;
}
}
if (discard) {
skip = true;
}
}
}
...
This is called when an end tag is found. We can now append it to the document we are building in memory if we wish.
...
#Override
public void endElement(String uri, String localName, String qName) throws SAXException {
// Rebuild the XML if it's a node we didn't skip
if (qName.equals("Movie")) {
if (!skip) {
result.add(contents.insert(0, "<Movie>").append("</Movie>").toString());
}
// reset the variables so we can check the next node
contents = null;
skip = false;
} else if (contents != null && !skip) {
contents.append("<").append(qName).append(">")
.append(currentData)
.append("</").append(qName).append(">");
}
currentElement = null;
}
...
Finally, this one is called when the document ends. I also used it to print the result at the end.
...
#Override
public void endDocument() throws SAXException {
StringBuilder resultFile = new StringBuilder();
resultFile.append("<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>");
resultFile.append("<Movies>");
for (String childNode : result) {
resultFile.append(childNode.toString());
}
resultFile.append("</Movies>");
System.out.println("=== Resulting XML containing Movies where " + tagToMatch + " is one of " + tagContents + " ===");
System.out.println(resultFile.toString());
}
}
Here is a small Java application which loads that file, and uses an event handler to extract the data.
public class SAXReaderExample {
public static final String PATH = "src/main/resources"; // this is where I put the XML file
public static void main(String[] args) throws ParserConfigurationException, SAXException, IOException {
// Obtain XML Reader
SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser();
XMLReader reader = sp.getXMLReader();
// Instantiate SAX handler
ExtractMovieSaxHandler handler = new ExtractMovieSaxHandler();
// set search criteria
handler.setSearchCriteria("Director", "Kubrick", false);
// Register handler with XML reader
reader.setContentHandler(handler);
// Parse the XML
reader.parse(new InputSource(new FileInputStream(new File(PATH, "source.xml"))));
}
}
Here is the resulting file, after processing:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Movies>
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt0062622</Imdb>
<Title>2001: A Space Odyssey</Title>
<Director>Stanley Kubrick</Director>
<Year>1968</Year>
<Duration>160</Duration>
</Movie>
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt0066921</Imdb>
<Title>A Clockwork Orange</Title>
<Director>Stanley Kubrick</Director>
<Year>1972</Year>
<Duration>136</Duration>
</Movie>
<Movie>
<Imdb>tt0081505</Imdb>
<Title>The Shining</Title>
<Director>Stanley Kubrick</Director>
<Year>1980</Year>
<Duration>144</Duration>
</Movie>
...
</Movies>
Your scenario might be different, but this example shows a general solution which you can probably adapt to your problem. You can find more information in tutorials about SAX and JAXP.

500Mb is well within the limits of what can be achieved using XSLT. It depends a little bit on how much effort you want to expend to develop an optimum solution: i.e., which is more expensive, your time or the machine's time?

Parsing XML when the parent and child tags are the same in JAVA

Quick Question. I have XML similiar to below.
<dst_adtr>
<dst_adtr>
<Name>TEST Name</Name>
<Table>objects</Table>
</dst_adtr>
</dst_adtr>
<dst_adtr>
<dst_adtr>
<Name>TEST Name TWO</Name>
<Table>objects</Table>
</dst_adtr>
</dst_adtr>
As you can see the parent tag and the child tag are the same.
I want to be able to search and then extract the information in the <Name> tag. How would I be able to specifically get to the Name tag?

If your schema is always going to contain above format, then you can use SAX Parser and every time you encounter a new dst_adtr node create a new POJO and grab the name and table body information. If you don't want to parse the content manually then use JAXB. Create an xsd file and auto generate the POJO's and post that you just have to invoke unmarshall to extract data from the xml

An example using a Pull parser and no external dependencies:
public void pullParse(InputStream in)
throws FactoryConfigurationError, XMLStreamException {
XMLInputFactory factory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();
factory.setProperty(XMLInputFactory.IS_COALESCING, Boolean.TRUE);
XMLEventReader reader = factory.createXMLEventReader(in);
boolean inName = false;
while (reader.hasNext()) {
XMLEvent o = reader.nextEvent();
if (inName && o.isCharacters()) {
System.out.println("name: " + o.asCharacters().getData());
} else if (inName && o.isEndElement()
&& "Name".equals(o.asEndElement().getName().toString())) {
inName = false;
}
if (o.isStartElement()
&& "Name".equals(o.asStartElement().getName().toString())) {
inName = true;
}
}
}

One option is you could just read the xml as a String and use a regex for matching.
(?:<Name>(.*?)</Name>)
Debuggex Demo
Then you can just extract all the matches.

stax - get xml node as string

xml looks like so:
<statements>
<statement account="123">
...stuff...
</statement>
<statement account="456">
...stuff...
</statement>
</statements>
I'm using stax to process one "<statement>" at a time and I got that working. I need to get that entire statement node as a string so I can create "123.xml" and "456.xml" or maybe even load it into a database table indexed by account.
using this approach: http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/30298/1954
I'm looking to do something like this:
String statementXml = staxXmlReader.getNodeByName("statement");
//load statementXml into database

I had a similar task and although the original question is older than a year, I couldn't find a satisfying answer. The most interesting answer up to now was Blaise Doughan's answer, but I couldn't get it running on the XML I am expecting (maybe some parameters for the underlying parser could change that?). Here the XML, very simplyfied:
<many-many-tags>
<description>
...
<p>Lorem ipsum...</p>
Devils inside...
...
</description>
</many-many-tags>
My solution:
public static String readElementBody(XMLEventReader eventReader)
throws XMLStreamException {
StringWriter buf = new StringWriter(1024);
int depth = 0;
while (eventReader.hasNext()) {
// peek event
XMLEvent xmlEvent = eventReader.peek();
if (xmlEvent.isStartElement()) {
++depth;
}
else if (xmlEvent.isEndElement()) {
--depth;
// reached END_ELEMENT tag?
// break loop, leave event in stream
if (depth < 0)
break;
}
// consume event
xmlEvent = eventReader.nextEvent();
// print out event
xmlEvent.writeAsEncodedUnicode(buf);
}
return buf.getBuffer().toString();
}
Usage example:
XMLEventReader eventReader = ...;
while (eventReader.hasNext()) {
XMLEvent xmlEvent = eventReader.nextEvent();
if (xmlEvent.isStartElement()) {
StartElement elem = xmlEvent.asStartElement();
String name = elem.getName().getLocalPart();
if ("DESCRIPTION".equals(name)) {
String xmlFragment = readElementBody(eventReader);
// do something with it...
System.out.println("'" + fragment + "'");
}
}
else if (xmlEvent.isEndElement()) {
// ...
}
}
Note that the extracted XML fragment will contain the complete extracted body content, including white space and comments. Filtering those on demand, or making the buffer size parametrizable have been left out for code brevity:
'
<description>
...
<p>Lorem ipsum...</p>
Devils inside...
...
</description>
'

You can use StAX for this. You just need to advance the XMLStreamReader to the start element for statement. Check the account attribute to get the file name. Then use the javax.xml.transform APIs to transform the StAXSource to a StreamResult wrapping a File. This will advance the XMLStreamReader and then just repeat this process.
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileReader;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamConstants;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamReader;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.stax.StAXSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
public class Demo {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
XMLInputFactory xif = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();
XMLStreamReader xsr = xif.createXMLStreamReader(new FileReader("input.xml"));
xsr.nextTag(); // Advance to statements element
while(xsr.nextTag() == XMLStreamConstants.START_ELEMENT) {
TransformerFactory tf = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer t = tf.newTransformer();
File file = new File("out" + xsr.getAttributeValue(null, "account") + ".xml");
t.transform(new StAXSource(xsr), new StreamResult(file));
}
}
}

Stax is a low-level access API, and it does not have either lookups or methods that access content recursively. But what you actually trying to do? And why are you considering Stax?
Beyond using a tree model (DOM, XOM, JDOM, Dom4j), which would work well with XPath, best choice when dealing with data is usually data binding library like JAXB. With it you can pass Stax or SAX reader and ask it to bind xml data into Java beans and instead of messing with xml process Java objects. This is often more convenient, and it is usually quite performance.
Only trick with larger files is that you do not want to bind the whole thing at once, but rather bind each sub-tree (in your case, one 'statement' at a time).
This is easiest done by iterating Stax XmlStreamReader, then using JAXB to bind.

I've been googling and this seems painfully difficult.
given my xml I think it might just be simpler to:
StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
for each line in file {
buffer.append(line)
if(line.equals(STMT_END_TAG)){
parse(buffer.toString())
buffer.delete(0,buffer.length)
}
}
private void parse(String statement){
//saxParser.parse( new InputSource( new StringReader( xmlText ) );
// do stuff
// save string
}

Why not just use xpath for this?
You could have a fairly simple xpath to get all 'statement' nodes.
Like so:
//statement
EDIT #1: If possible, take a look at dom4j. You could read the String and get all 'statement' nodes fairly simply.
EDIT #2: Using dom4j, this is how you would do it:
(from their cookbook)
String text = "your xml here";
Document document = DocumentHelper.parseText(text);
public void bar(Document document) {
List list = document.selectNodes( "//statement" );
// loop through node data
}

I had the similar problem and found the solution.
I used the solution proposed by #t0r0X but it does not work well in the current implementation in Java 11, the method xmlEvent.writeAsEncodedUnicode creates the invalid string representation of the start element (in the StartElementEvent class) in the result XML fragment, so I had to modify it, but then it seems to work well, what I could immediatelly verify by the parsing of the fragment by DOM and JaxBMarshaller to specific data containers.
In my case I had the huge structure
<Orders>
<ns2:SyncOrder xmlns:ns2="..." xmlns:ns3="....." ....>
.....
</ns2:SyncOrder>
<ns2:SyncOrder xmlns:ns2="..." xmlns:ns3="....." ....>
.....
</ns2:SyncOrder>
...
</Orders>
in the file of multiple hundred megabytes (a lot of repeating "SyncOrder" structures), so the usage of DOM would lead to a large memory consumption and slow evaluation. Therefore I used the StAX to split the huge XML to smaller XML pieces, which I have analyzed with DOM and used the JaxbElements generated from the xsd definition of the element SyncOrder (This infrastructure I had from the webservice, which uses the same structure, but it is not important).
In this code there can be seen Where the XML fragment has een created and could be used, I used it directly in other processing...
private static <T> List<T> unmarshallMultipleSyncOrderXmlData(
InputStream aOrdersXmlContainingSyncOrderItems,
Function<SyncOrderType, T> aConversionFunction) throws XMLStreamException, ParserConfigurationException, IOException, SAXException {
DocumentBuilderFactory locDocumentBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
locDocumentBuilderFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
DocumentBuilder locDocBuilder = locDocumentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
List<T> locResult = new ArrayList<>();
XMLInputFactory locFactory = XMLInputFactory.newFactory();
XMLEventReader locReader = locFactory.createXMLEventReader(aOrdersXmlContainingSyncOrderItems);
boolean locIsInSyncOrder = false;
QName locSyncOrderElementQName = null;
StringWriter locXmlTextBuffer = new StringWriter();
int locDepth = 0;
while (locReader.hasNext()) {
XMLEvent locEvent = locReader.nextEvent();
if (locEvent.isStartElement()) {
if (locDepth == 0 && Objects.equals(locEvent.asStartElement().getName().getLocalPart(), "Orders")) {
locDepth++;
} else {
if (locDepth <= 0)
throw new IllegalStateException("There has been passed invalid XML stream intot he function. "
+ "Expecting the element 'Orders' as the root alament of the document, but found was '"
+ locEvent.asStartElement().getName().getLocalPart() + "'.");
locDepth++;
if (locSyncOrderElementQName == null) {
/* First element after the "Orders" has passed, so we retrieve
* the name of the element with the namespace prefix: */
locSyncOrderElementQName = locEvent.asStartElement().getName();
}
if(Objects.equals(locEvent.asStartElement().getName(), locSyncOrderElementQName)) {
locIsInSyncOrder = true;
}
}
} else if (locEvent.isEndElement()) {
locDepth--;
if(locDepth == 1 && Objects.equals(locEvent.asEndElement().getName(), locSyncOrderElementQName)) {
locEvent.writeAsEncodedUnicode(locXmlTextBuffer);
/* at this moment the call of locXmlTextBuffer.toString() gets the complete fragment
* of XML containing the valid SyncOrder element, but I have continued to other processing,
* which immediatelly validates the produced XML fragment is valid and passes the values
* to communication object: */
Document locDocument = locDocBuilder.parse(new ByteArrayInputStream(locXmlTextBuffer.toString().getBytes()));
SyncOrderType locItem = unmarshallSyncOrderDomNodeToCo(locDocument);
locResult.add(aConversionFunction.apply(locItem));
locXmlTextBuffer = new StringWriter();
locIsInSyncOrder = false;
}
}
if (locIsInSyncOrder) {
if (locEvent.isStartElement()) {
/* here replaced the standard implementation of startElement's method writeAsEncodedUnicode: */
locXmlTextBuffer.write(startElementToStrng(locEvent.asStartElement()));
} else {
locEvent.writeAsEncodedUnicode(locXmlTextBuffer);
}
}
}
return locResult;
}
private static String startElementToString(StartElement aStartElement) {
StringBuilder locStartElementBuffer = new StringBuilder();
// open element
locStartElementBuffer.append("<");
String locNameAsString = null;
if ("".equals(aStartElement.getName().getNamespaceURI())) {
locNameAsString = aStartElement.getName().getLocalPart();
} else if (aStartElement.getName().getPrefix() != null
&& !"".equals(aStartElement.getName().getPrefix())) {
locNameAsString = aStartElement.getName().getPrefix()
+ ":" + aStartElement.getName().getLocalPart();
} else {
locNameAsString = aStartElement.getName().getLocalPart();
}
locStartElementBuffer.append(locNameAsString);
// add any attributes
Iterator<Attribute> locAttributeIterator = aStartElement.getAttributes();
Attribute attr;
while (locAttributeIterator.hasNext()) {
attr = locAttributeIterator.next();
locStartElementBuffer.append(" ");
locStartElementBuffer.append(attributeToString(attr));
}
// add any namespaces
Iterator<Namespace> locNamespaceIterator = aStartElement.getNamespaces();
Namespace locNamespace;
while (locNamespaceIterator.hasNext()) {
locNamespace = locNamespaceIterator.next();
locStartElementBuffer.append(" ");
locStartElementBuffer.append(attributeToString(locNamespace));
}
// close start tag
locStartElementBuffer.append(">");
// return StartElement as a String
return locStartElementBuffer.toString();
}
private static String attributeToString(Attribute aAttr) {
if( aAttr.getName().getPrefix() != null && aAttr.getName().getPrefix().length() > 0 )
return aAttr.getName().getPrefix() + ":" + aAttr.getName().getLocalPart() + "='" + aAttr.getValue() + "'";
else
return aAttr.getName().getLocalPart() + "='" + aAttr.getValue() + "'";
}
public static SyncOrderType unmarshallSyncOrderDomNodeToCo(
Node aSyncOrderItemNode) {
Source locSource = new DOMSource(aSyncOrderItemNode);
Object locUnmarshalledObject = getMarshallerAndUnmarshaller().unmarshal(locSource);
SyncOrderType locCo = ((JAXBElement<SyncOrderType>) locUnmarshalledObject).getValue();
return locCo;
}