Editing Simple API for XML (section)

== Example ==
Given the following XML document:

<syntaxhighlight lang="xml">
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <DocumentElement param="value">
     <FirstElement>
         &#xb6; Some Text
     </FirstElement>
     <?some_pi some_attr="some_value"?>
     <SecondElement param2="something">
         Pre-Text <Inline>Inlined text</Inline> Post-text.
     </SecondElement>
</DocumentElement>
</syntaxhighlight>

This XML document, when passed through a SAX parser, will generate a sequence of events like the following:
* XML Element start, named ''DocumentElement'', with an attribute ''param'' equal to "value"
* XML Element start, named ''FirstElement''
* XML Text node, with data equal to "&amp;#xb6; Some Text" (note: certain white spaces can be changed)
* XML Element end, named ''FirstElement''
* Processing Instruction event, with the target ''some_pi'' and data ''some_attr="some_value"'' (the content after the target is just text; however, it is very common to imitate the syntax of XML attributes, as in this example)
* XML Element start, named ''SecondElement'', with an attribute ''param2'' equal to "something"
* XML Text node, with data equal to "Pre-Text"
* XML Element start, named ''Inline''
* XML Text node, with data equal to "Inlined text"
* XML Element end, named ''Inline''
* XML Text node, with data equal to "Post-text."
* XML Element end, named ''SecondElement''
* XML Element end, named ''DocumentElement''
Note that the first line of the sample above is the XML Declaration and not a processing instruction; as such it will not be reported as a processing instruction event (although some SAX implementations provide a separate event just for the XML declaration).

The result above may vary: the SAX specification deliberately states that a given section of text may be reported as multiple sequential text events. Many parsers, for example, return separate text events for numeric character references. Thus in the example above, a SAX parser may generate a different series of events, part of which might include:
* XML Element start, named ''FirstElement''
* XML Text node, with data equal to "&amp;#xb6;" (the Unicode character U+00b6)
* XML Text node, with data equal to " Some Text"
* XML Element end, named ''FirstElement''