Using the SAX parser to split up a document to be processed by a DOMParser

Question

I need to process a potentially large document which could prove too large to be read into memory at once by the DOM parser. The document would look something like..
(sorry about the formatting - can't use tabs!)
<Root>
<Parent>
<Child>
<Blah.....................
</Blah>
</Child>
</Parent>
<Parent>
<Child.......
</Child>
</Parent>
etc...
etc...
</Root>
The number of Parent elements could potentially be in the thousands. What I would like to do would be to use the SAX parser to read the document and when a Parent element is encountered, write the parent element and all its children to a stream in order that an input source can be created. The input source can then be parsed by a DOM parser. Once complete, the next Parent element encountered by the SAX parser could be passed to the DOM parser and so on until all of the Parent elements have been processed.
This way I can combine the ease of parsing the document using the DOM parser without having to worry about the overhead on memory.
Does anyone have any ideas as to the best approach? I could use the SAX parser for the whole thing but the XML is quite complex and lends itself to DOM parsing much more conveniently.

Answer 1

Can you read the file line by line:
start the reading at <child>
pause reading at </child>
copy the string to a var
wrap it with respective tags (<?xml<doctype etc...) and parse
proceed to the next <child>xx</child>
and repeat till you hit the closing of the file...
- Ravi