XML and Perl

Advantages of Event-Driven Parsers

Event-driven parsers have several advantages over tree-based parsers.

An event-driven parser can handle huge amounts of XML data. Let’s say that you need to parse XML data in a file that is hundreds of megabytes in size. The parser works through the file, reading each line, triggering events when they’re needed. A DOM-based parser would need to read the entire file into memory at once, something that might be difficult on smaller PCs or workstations. So, for the same XML data, a DOM-based parser requires more memory. Depending on the size of the XML data, it can be impractical (or even impossible) to use a DOM-based parser.

Another advantage of an event-driven parser is the complete XML file doesn’t need ...