[libxml-devel] Counting bytes parsed with SAX

[Nolan Darilek]

Hello, apologies if this is documented somewhere and I'm just not  
finding it. Could be a matter of me just not knowing relevant  
terminology to grep for.

I'm using a library that's parsing XML using the SAX stream parser.  
I'm trying to incorporate some sort of parsing progress bar into my  
application, meaning that unless I'm missing something, it is  
essential to know how many bytes the stream parser has processed in  
all events. In looking at both the library and the libxml SAX stream  
parser, though, I'm not seeing any way of getting at how many bytes  
have been parsed. Most ideal would be a general-purpose callback  
called whenever any valid chunk of XML is parsed, with some means of  
getting at the amount of data processed. Less ideal but still valid  
would be some means of getting at the raw data that generated any  
given event so I can increment some sort of internal counter on the  
callback.

Does anything like this currently exist in either the bindings or  
libxml itself? If the latter and not the former, how difficult would  
it be to add this to the bindings?

Failing that, is there some other means of implementing this sort of  
functionality? One suggestion was to handle progress based on objects  
in the file, not bytes parsed. Not sure I like this as much, as it  
both introduces a second pass to the processing and doesn't seem as  
precise.

Thanks a bunch.