Passing data out of a Sax parser

[Tim Rowe]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 00:53:06 GMT, "Andrew Dalke"
<adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

>Tim Rowe:
>> b. Add a parameter to the handler's __init__ method, that takes some
>> sort of mutable object, and put the answer into that object.
>
>Either that or have startDocument create the mutable object, as
>
>class MyHandler(xml.sax.handlers.ContentHandler):
>  def startDocument(self):
>    self.count = 0
>  def startElement(self, name, attrs):
>    if name == "spam":
>        self.count += 1
>
>parser = xml.sax.make_parser()
>h = MyHandler()
>parser.setContentHandler(h)
>h.parse(input)
>print h.count

Ah!  Of course!  Thanks, I should have thought of that.  As others
have pointed out, startDocument can create any sort of an object
there, not just a mutable, of course; it was my solution that required
a mutable.