Re: [xml-dev] Error and Fatal Error

[Chris Burdess <dog@bluezoo.org>]

Joe Fawcett wrote:
> Do I take it that most mainstream parsers then treat any error as fatal?

I don't know about "mainstream parsers" but at least the GNU XML parser, Ælfred, and Xerces treat (correctly) recoverable errors as recoverable, and fatal errors as fatal. For an idea about what it means to be a recoverable or a fatal error, read the org.xml.sax.ErrorHandler interface documentation.

This means in practice that a SAX handler will receive precisely one fatalError callback whereupon the parser will halt, whereas it may receive multiple error callbacks and the parser will continue to the end of the document (or a fatal error).