Chapter 6. Tree Processing

Having done just about all we can do with streams, it's time to move on to another style of XML processing. Instead of letting the XML fly past the program one tiny piece at a time, we will capture the whole document in memory and then start working on it. Having an in-memory representation built behind the scenes for us makes our job much easier, although it tends to require more memory and CPU cycles.

This chapter is an overview of programming with persistent XML objects, better known as tree processing. It looks at a variety of different modules and strategies for building and accessing XML trees, including the rigorous, standard Document Object Model (DOM), fast access to internal document parts with XPath, and efficient tree processing methods.