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# Sax support

In this document we'll describe lxml's SAX support. lxml has support for producing SAX events for an ElementTree or Element. lxml can also turn SAX events into an ElementTree. The SAX API used by lxml is compatible with that in the Python core (xml.sax), so is useful for interfacing lxml with code that uses the Python core SAX facilities.

Contents

- Building a tree from SAX events
- Producing SAX events from an ElementTree or Element
- Interfacing with pulldom/minidom

# Building a tree from SAX events

First of all, lxml has support for building a new tree given SAX events. To do this, we use the special SAX content handler defined by lxml named `lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler`:

    >>> import lxml.sax
    >>> handler = lxml.sax.ElementTreeContentHandler()

Now let's fire some SAX events at it:

    >>> handler.startElementNS((None, 'a'), 'a', {})
    >>> handler.startElementNS((None, 'b'), 'b', {(None, 'foo'): 'bar'})
    >>> handler.characters('Hello world')
    >>> handler.endElementNS((None, 'b'), 'b')
    >>> handler.endElementNS((None, 'a'), 'a')

This constructs an equivalent tree. You can access it through the `etree` property of the handler:

    >>> tree = handler.etree
    >>> lxml.etree.tostring(tree.getroot())
    b'<a><b foo="bar">Hello world</b></a>'

By passing a `makeelement` function the constructor of `ElementTreeContentHandler`, e.g. the one of a parser you configured, you can determine which element class lookup scheme should be used.

# Producing SAX events from an ElementTree or Element

Let's make a tree we can generate SAX events for:

    >>> f = StringIO('<a><b>Text</b></a>')
    >>> tree = lxml.etree.parse(f)

To see whether the correct SAX events are produced, we'll write a custom content handler.:

    >>> from xml.sax.handler import ContentHandler
    >>> class MyContentHandler(ContentHandler):
    ...     def __init__(self):
    ...         self.a_amount = 0
    ...         self.b_amount = 0
    ...         self.text = None
    ...
    ...     def startElementNS(self, name, qname, attributes):
    ...         uri, localname = name
    ...         if localname == 'a':
    ...             self.a_amount += 1
    ...         if localname == 'b':
    ...             self.b_amount += 1
    ...
    ...     def characters(self, data):
    ...         self.text = data

Note that it only defines the startElementNS() method and not startElement(). The SAX event generator in lxml.sax currently only supports namespace-aware processing.

To test the content handler, we can produce SAX events from the tree:

    >>> handler = MyContentHandler()
    >>> lxml.sax.saxify(tree, handler)

This is what we expect:

    >>> handler.a_amount
    1
    >>> handler.b_amount
    1
    >>> handler.text
    'Text'

# Interfacing with pulldom/minidom

lxml.sax is a simple way to interface with the standard XML support in the Python library. Note, however, that this is a one-way solution, as Python's DOM implementation cannot generate SAX events from a DOM tree.

You can use xml.dom.pulldom to build a minidom from lxml:

    >>> from xml.dom.pulldom import SAX2DOM
    >>> handler = SAX2DOM()
    >>> lxml.sax.saxify(tree, handler)

PullDOM makes the result available through the `document` attribute:

    >>> dom = handler.document
    >>> print(dom.firstChild.localName)
    a