SAX is a standard interface for event based XML parsing.

SAX defines a number of events. It’s up to you to listen for them and respond to them.

The documents are accessed serially and an event is triggered at different parts of the document.

The common events are:

1. 
   
   start of the document
   
   


2. 
   
   start elements
   
   


3. 
   
   characters
   
   


4. 
   
   end elements
   
   


5. 
   
   end of the document. 
   
   

Basically you would write a program that has event handlers.

SAX is fast and has a low memory requirement.

SAX parsing is harder to setup.