What is SAX?

SAX (Simple API for XML) is an event-driven, serial access mechanism to parse XML documents. Unlike DOM (Document Object Model), SAX doesn't build an in-memory tree representation of the XML document. Instead, it reports parsing events (like start/end of elements, text content) directly to the application, which allows for efficient processing of very large XML files with low memory footprint. It's commonly used when you need to read and process XML data sequentially without the need to modify the XML structure.