The parser package contains all definitions required for the XML parser implemented by the iXML library.

For each XML document to be parsed, a separate parser instance is required. In a way, the iXMLParser class implements an iterator over an XML input stream. Until now, there is no reset() method that would allow to reset an XML parser to its initial state. Therefore a new parser instance is required for each XML document to parse.

The XML parser supports two models of parsing:

1. DOM-generating parsing, where a W3C DOM-compliant (Document Object Model) representation of the XML document is generated from the parsed XML document.
2. Event signaling parsing, where the parser is not generating a DOM representation, but signals events about the occurrence of particular logical elements in an XML document during the parsing process to the client application; this allows the application to use the parsed data on the fly and e.g. convert it to alternative representations (e.g. database relational tables).

It is also possible to mix both modes of parsing.

The XML parser itself is compliant with the XML 1.0 language specification as defined in the document "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0, W3C Recommendation 10-Feb-98" (http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210.pdf).

As of today, the parser is a non-validating parser, even though validation is planned for the next release of the iXML library.

The package Parser contains the following interfaces: