@tuananh/sax-parser

sax-parser

What this is

A very fast SAX parser for Node.js written in C++. Native module for performance reason.

Installation

pnpm install @tuananh/sax-parser
# npm install @tuananh/sax-parser

Benchmark

benchmark/index.js compares SAX-style parsers on a ~10 KB XML document. Each parser registers noop startElement, endElement, and text handlers so the comparison includes event dispatch overhead.

npm run benchmark

Results on Node.js v26.5.0, Linux x64:

module	ops/sec	native	XML compliant	stream
@tuananh/sax-parser	16,962
easysax	11,126
saxophone	7,543
ltx	3,853
sax	1,551
node-expat	1,200
node-xml	759

ops/sec: higher is better.

ltx is included for reference — it is fast but not fully XML spec compliant. @tuananh/sax-parser is the fastest in this comparison while remaining a native parser with streaming and full XML compliance.

Usage

• See example/print.js for an example how to use this library to pretty print XML to process.stdout.
• Or example/stream.js for an example of using this library with stream.
• For complete API documentation, see API.md.

Sample usage

const { Readable } = require('stream')
const SaxParser = require('@tuananh/sax-parser')

const parser = new SaxParser()
const xml = '<hello><item id="1"><name>foo</name></item></hello>'

const readStream = new Readable()
readStream._read = () => {}
readStream.push(xml)
readStream.push(null)

readStream
    .pipe(parser)
    .on('startElement', (name, attrs) => {
        console.log('name', name)
    })
    .on('text', (text) => {
        console.log('text', text)
    })
    .on('end', () => {
        console.log('done')
    })

Development

You will need to have all node-gyp's requirements installed.

git clone git@github.com:tuananh/sax-parser.git
cd sax-parser
npm install
npm run build
node example/print.js
npm run test

Credits

• engine-x: a fork of cocos2d-x game engine
• xsxml: The embedded xml SAX parser, extract from pugixml/rapidxml DOM parsers
• addon-event-emitter: How to create and use event emitter interface on Node.js add-ons
• addon-stream: How to use and create stream on Node.js native add-ons
• napi-example-transformstream: Simple transform stream implementation using node-addon-api
• Node.js C++ addon examples: Official Node.js C++ addon examples from Node.js