Listing 1. A Useful Subset of Methods in ContentHandler

  /**
   * Receive notification of the beginning of a document.
   *
   * <p>The SAX parser will invoke this method only once, before any
   * other methods in this interface or in
   * {@link org.xml.sax.DTDHandler DTDHandler}
   * (except for {@link #setDocumentLocator
   * setDocumentLocator}).</p>
   */
  public void startDocument ()
	  throws SAXException;


  /**
   * Receive notification of the end of a document.
   *
   * <p>The SAX parser will invoke this method only once, and it
   * will be the last method invoked during the parse.
   * The parser shall not invoke this method until it has either
   * abandoned parsing (because of an unrecoverable error) or
   * reached the end of input.</p>
   */
  public void endDocument()
	  throws SAXException;


  /**
   * Receive notification of the beginning of an element.
   *
   * <p>The Parser will invoke this method at the beginning of every
   * element in the XML document; there will be a corresponding
   * {@link #endElement endElement} event for every startElement event
   * (even when the element is empty). All of the element's content
   * will be reported, in order, before the corresponding endElement
   * event.</p>
   */
  public void startElement (String namespaceURI, String localName,
          String qName, Attributes atts)throws SAXException;

  /**
   * Receive notification of the end of an element.
   *
   * <p>The SAX parser will invoke this method at the end of every
   * element in the XML document; there will be a corresponding
   * {@link #startElement startElement} event for every endElement
   * event (even when the element is empty).</p>
   */
  public void endElement (String namespaceURI, String localName,
        String qName) throws SAXException;


  /**
   * Receive notification of character data.
   *
   * <p>The Parser will call this method to report each chunk of
   * character data.  SAX parsers may return all contiguous character
   * data in a single chunk, or they may split it into several
   * chunks; however, all of the characters in any single event
   * must come from the same external entity so that the Locator
   * provides useful information.</p>
   */
  public void characters (char ch[], int start, int length)
  	throws SAXException;